Daniel Solove writes:
Does scholarship really have an impact? For a long time, naysayers have attacked scholarship, especially scholarship about law. U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts once remarked: “Pick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something.” He noted that when the academy addresses legal issues at “a particularly abstract, philosophical level . . . they shouldn’t expect that it would be of any particular help or even interest to the members of the practice of the bar or judges.” Judge Harry Edwards also has attacked legal scholarship as largely irrelevant.
Critics are quick to point out that much legal scholarship is not cited much — and many articles are never even cited by anyone other than the authors themselves in subsequent works.
But I think that a lot can be learned from the story of one of the most influential law articles of all. That article was Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harvard Law Review 193 (1890).
Read more on Concurring Opinions.
Related: Orin Kerr has now uploaded a short paper to SSRN called, “The Influence of Immanuel Kant on Evidentiary Approaches in Eighteenth Century Bulgaria.” As Orin writes, “Well, someone had to do it.”