New Perspectives on the Legal Treatise

Now in an era in which it is uncommon to find much discussion and newly written commentary on aspects of law publishing, as distinct from artificial intelligence technology, it was a pleasant surprise to encounter New Perspectives on the Legal Treatise. The content of the book was edited by Femi Cadmus, who, at the time, was law librarian and Professor of Law at Yale Law School and Nicholas Mignanelli, Assistant Dean and Director of the Mabee Legal Information Center [sic] and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa College of Law. Its contributions are based on the proceedings of the Second Yale Legal Information Symposium, held in 2023, since when it might be argued, of course, that the world of legal information is not as before. Certainly, just using my own published observations on law publishing as a measure, by 2023, while it was not possible or wise to ignore AI developments, since then, the scale, importance and extent of debate on the topic has increased exponentially; some might even say excessively.

The book considers how legal treatises have shaped US legal research and how they continue to function amid shifts in technology, access, and research practices. Published in late 2025 by William S. Hein & Co., it features essays by some sixteen distinguished North American legal academics and law librarians, all of whom deserve commendation for their contributions and insights.

My expectations about what the book would actually offer altered somewhat once I began to read it, as opposed to having initially seen promotional literature describing it. The headline “Why the legal treatise still deserves a closer look” caused me, perhaps erroneously, to imagine that it would be primarily an argument in favour of the printed treatise concept in an age of increasing artificial intelligence, and the risk of harm to scholarship which that might entail. Therefore, I assumed that I might skip through much of the historical content, on grounds that it is done, and is, so to speak, what it is, with history being incapable of being changed, and go, almost directly, on to what the future might hold, in the opinions of the learned writers. That I was wrong was in no sense a disappointment, as I found the historical accounts of the concept of legal treatises fascinating, focused, as they are, on the USA, with references to and comparisons with those of other jurisdictions, notably England, as important but somewhat peripheral. Hence, in my judgment, New Perspectives on the Legal Treatise is a well-edited collection of articles on legal and publishing history, which I might have otherwise entitled, in a more specific way, “A Retrospective Appraisal of Legal Treatise Publishing in and for the USA”. Its authors and editors are deeply knowledgeable on the subject matter and would appear to be, even today, enthusiastic about the concept under discussion, as should be expected.

My pleasure, in the year in which marks 200 years since the publication of the first edition of Chitty on Contracts, upon being given the opportunity to dwell on historical aspects, allowed a welcome and rare diversion from having to read incessantly about what are, to me, tedious technical tweaks, together with boasts about private equity investment in AI. Instead, the book humanises the story of the birth of the USA through the influence of the people who, and ideas which created its modern legal system. To non-US readers such as me, with a Northern Ireland undergraduate bachelor of laws and jurisprudence degree, and publishing experience acquired in London, initially in legal editing and subsequently commercial legal publishing management, while the US experience is familiar, the important differences which have served to bring about the evolutionary path of the legal treatise are thoughtfully brought into focus. The federal system of government, the mixing of common law and civil law traditions, the written constitution and partial codification of law sit alongside differing ways of teaching law at university and of providing pre-qualification professional training for attorneys, as well as barristers, solicitors, advocates, notaries and others, depending on the jurisdiction. These issues and many more, as explained by the writers, serve to make sense of how and why legal treatise publishing has developed differently in various jurisdictions, driven by the many variable factors.

For purposes of this review, the issue of dramatic developments in artificial intelligence presently and in the future, somewhat separately from historical perceptions on law book publishing, must be kept in mind, to the extent that they will affect the opinions expressed in the past. I am certain that, if written in 2026/2027 rather than 2023/2024, the book simply could not have ignored such questions as law treatises being licensed from publishers to populate and train large language models and with that, issues of the quality and reputations of the treatises in question. Likewise, ever important in a digital era, is the matter of real-time currency of treatises. To quote from the book, “to be a reliable statement of contemporary legal doctrine, a treatise must be updated at least once a year”. In contrast, it was shocking to read, in the midst of today’s weaponised and corrupt US official structures and once respected institutions, of Supreme Court Justices citing long out-of-date and superseded editions in determining legal cases before them. The disciplines of the best of modern treatise publishing serve to maintain good law.

I believe that it is important to judge a law book not only by its core content but also its signposting metadata, production values and price. In this case, the print size is generous, with good spacing, and I found the extensive footnotes, being properly positioned, to be a measurable benefit. The index is adequate to support the book’s 300 or so Executive/Super Octavo pages. However, perhaps it tries to do too much, being heavily populated by names, places and titles, and it is a little insufficient on the level of taxonomy that underpins the best of indices. I would have preferred to see a separate short table of reported cases, with citations, extracted from footnotes.

Factual and descriptive, thankfully, rather than overtly polemical in favour of or against the law treatise concept itself, this book reminds me that the purpose of the classic law treatise is to provide integrated and structured information, with subjective and objective opinions for lawyers, scholars and students. However, they are not, in and of themselves, substitutes for the work of the courts and legislative bodies. Its content offers different benefits for different people, partly thanks to the broad range of expertise underpinning its totality. A minor, perhaps predictable criticism, notwithstanding its overall character, is that the book might have been enhanced by the inclusion of a chapter written by someone with career-based, insider experience of US law publishing. So often, the perceptions of law publishers differ from those of authors, editors and other external scholars, particularly on the reasoning behind publishing decisions of one kind or another, and opinions about optimal quality standards and markets. That said, some chapters will appeal strongly to legal and publishing historians, while others will provide valuable insights for lawyers, law librarians and students examining these specialist subjects. However esoteric and limited might its appeal be, this interest should extend beyond the USA, to libraries and readers in obvious common law and some civil law jurisdictions, perhaps especially in Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, but much further afield than that, in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, including many of the 56 Commonwealth countries. I thoroughly recommend it.

New Perspectives on the Legal Treatise is published by William S. Hein & Co., Inc. Its ISBN is 9780837743325 and its price is US$130.00.