Schubert, Glendon

English

York University, Osgoode Hall Law School

Osgoode Hall Law JournalVolume 8, Number 2 (November 1970) Article 15The Scope of Interdisciplinary CollaborationGlendon SchubertYork UniversityFollow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohljArticleThis Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Osgoode Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Osgoode HallLaw Journal by an authorized editor of Osgoode Digital Commons.Citation InformationSchubert, Glendon. "The Scope of Interdisciplinary Collaboration." Osgoode Hall Law Journal 8.2 (1970) : 389-391.http://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/ohlj/vol8/iss2/15THE SCOPE OF INTERDISCIPLINARYCOLLABORATIONGLENDON SCHUBERT*I find myself in such substantial agreement with what Professor Mohrsaid concerning the need for interdisciplinary cooperation that, rather than tocavil over his existentialist philosophy of science, I should rather turn to a fewpoints that were made by Professor Levi, with whom I find it much easier todisagree wholeheartedly. There are two points in particular which I have inmind. The first relates to the possible desirability of having greater inter-disciplinary collaboration among lawyers and other social scientists. I statethe proposition in such a general and open stance because in this formit implies that law is a social science too. The second point concerns howinterdisciplinary cooperation can be facilitated, and whether or not pre-legaluniversity education can now be dispensed with in the United States as wellas in Canada.Let us consider what is the appropriate sort of comparison if we want totalk about the quality of behavioural science empirical knowledge. I supposeno one will dispute that that knowledge is uneven; and if we're going tocompare it with that of atomic physics, then behavioural knowledge is ratherpoor in both validity and reliability. But that, of course, is not the appropriatecomparison. I should think any atomic physicist who tried to solve hisproblems of theory and methodology by turning to political science for empiri-cal answers would be a madman. The relevant question is, rather, what isthe relative validity and reliability of empirical knowledge, knowledge aboutfacts, about the real world, as produced by traditional methods of legalresearch, in comparison to what is available through behavioural science?This is the appropriate comparison. And when we state it that way, we maycome out with a very different answer than the one that Professor Levisuggested. Anyhow, I'm going to assume that that would be the case andtalk in a very pragmatic, empirical way about how interdisciplinary collabora-tion, which I assume to be desirable, can take place, focusing particularly uponrelationships among other social scientists and lawyers. I do, however, thinkthat the problem of interdisciplinary collaboration is a very general one andthis is just one aspect of it.In the first place, it's my impression that when lawyers and law schoolfaculties think in terms of collaborating with social scientists, the frequent andmost usual stance of the lawmen is to assume that they can acquire somebehavioural clerks who will do some sort of technical work for them, in thesame way that political scientists often want to use computer programmers.The lawman (or political scientist) thinks: there are certain technical tasksthat are not terribly important. I don't want to bother to learn them myself;*University Professor, York University.OSGOODE HALL LAW JOURNALI'll get someone else to do them for me and then I can go and do my thingthat I'm accustomed to doing in the usual way. I think this point of view isperhaps best expressed in an article by Samuel Fahr (at least then a lawprofessor at Iowa) that appeared in the first volume of the Washburn LawReview about eight years ago. Another example of this, I think, can bedrawn from the experience of sociologist Fred Strodtbeck, which I choosebecause the Chicago Jury Project is one of the best publicized and wellsupported instances of attempts at interdisciplinary collaboration involvinglawmen. In the Evan book on Law and Sociology, Strodtbeck has a footnotein which he remarks that at no time did anything that was going on in theChicago Jury Project affect legal pedagogy in the University of Chicago LawSchool. The research on juries was completely independent of what went onin terms of teaching; and at no time was any of the several cooperatingresearch sociologists of the project asked to teach law students. Now, we canturn this around and talk about the alternative possibility of the co-option oflawyers by social scientists. But here again I don't think that the results sofar have been terribly happy. I suppose that perhaps one of the most success-ful examples we can point to is the work during the last generation of HaroldLasswell at the Yale Law Faculty, where he personally has been influentialupon a number of his colleagues and upon a good many students. Lasswellremains, however, a rather isolated example of what might be called co-optionby infiltration. We do have a number of persons, previously trained in law,who have joined the political science profession as teachers; but on the wholethese are not persons who have been identified with significant breakthroughsin scientific theory and method in political science. They have tended, instead,to be persons who have taught public law in the traditional mode in which -as one gathers from one of Arthur Miller's recent articles - it still tendsto be taught in many faculties.An alternative possibility to co-option is boot strapping, by which Idon't mean merely picking up some technique, such as multiple regressionanalysis: you get a statistics text book, you learn how to do multiple regressionanalysis, and maybe get one program that you know how to use and then youkeep running data with it. There are some people in political science, forexample, who do this sort of thing; and I suppose there are other socialscientist addicts too. What I have in mind by boot strapping, however, is themuch harder and more serious business of attempting to educate yourself, inearly or later middle-age, in ways that you haven't been trained as a youth.Now, I don't think anybody can fully succeed in this and, moreover, I don'tthink it proffers any real solution to the problem; it is rather a stop gapmeasure until better ways of accomplishing the desired result can be developed.A better alternative is provided by the hybrids, people who have, let'ssay a Ph.D. in Economics, plus a law degree. (I think, incidentally, that thereis a difference between the people who do law first instead of later.)A few such persons have joined law faculties and begun to use their commandof economic theory and economic methods in teaching law courses. Theproblem is that these are very expensive people to produce and I don't thinkwe'll ever produce enough of them to really make any major change alongthe direction that would be desirable.[VCOL. 8, No. 2Urban Legal Studies SymposiumSo that leaves my final alternative, and the one which is going to take thelongest time: giving lawyers a better education in pre-law. One of the respectsin which law schools have been most irresponsible and most short sighted is intheir failure to define, better than they have, what they expect to be done interms of university education of the students who are going to come to them.This business of saying "be broad, and maybe take a course in Latin or acouple of courses in English" doesn't help anybody and it doesn't produce anyparticular kind of product either. It seems to me that if, in the future, morepeople can be well trained in the behavioural sciences, at least to the levelof an undergraduate degree, and then go on into law school work, the longrange solution for interdisciplinary collaboration will come about through thebest law students who will become law teachers having themselves had a bettereducation, that is, a more relevant education in the behavioural sciences thanhas tended to be true in the past. But even here I must close on apessimistic note, for this solution is an increasingly less hopeful one undercontemporary circumstances: there seem to be so many contemporary pres-sures upon the undergraduate students, who ought to be being trained thisway, to by-pass the longer-range kind of training in the skills that are needed,in order to (understandably) engage themselves immediately in attempts toresolve urgent social problems with whatever level of skills they happen tohave picked up in secondary school - which rarely is high. They are notwilling to take the longer time needed to acquire the competence relevant tothe kind of problems for which, it seems to me, interdisciplinary knowledge isso badly needed.1970]

The Scope of Interdisciplinary Collaboration

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