Empirical marine life in legal waters: Clams, dolphins, and plankton

The future of empirical scholarship in the legal academy will hinge on the nature and level of exchange between traditional and empirically minded scholars, and on the academy's reaction to the exchange. In this article, Professor Diamond describes the range of legal research that can be characterized as empirical, and illustrates the interconnectedness of empirical and nonempirical research. She next offers a typology that describes how three general categories of scholars view empirical research, and the different forms that their interactions with empirical scholarship can take. She then explains how shifts in category occupancy within the typology are likely to affect both the quality of empirical research on law and the future of empiricism in the legal academy.