The Harvard Law School website has a page about a law school seminar in which students get to comment on the works-in-progress of top law professors:
This fall, Professors Richard Fallon and Heather Gerken offered more than 30 students a rare chance to review and challenge works-in-progress by some of the country’s leading scholars in law. The setting was the Public Law Workshop, a series of seminars attended not just by the enrolled students and visiting scholars but routinely by other HLS faculty members.
Fallon and Gerken encouraged participants to probe, prod and troubleshoot the work of established legal scholars from Harvard and other law faculties, to help fine-tune their research and make midcourse adjustments to book drafts and law review articles in the field of public law, which Fallon described as a “broad, vague and not well-defined” area that combines constitutional and administrative law.
This idea has been tried at a number of schools. For example, here’s a site for a similar seminar on IP at Boalt. It’s a great concept, I think: students get to see what professors really do and participate actively in developing scholarship, while professors get a set of fresh eyes to comment on their works. More schools should do this.
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