Joint authorships have a big future in legal scholarship. This is standard practice in many other academic disciplines, and it seems to be growing in the law. I’ve been lucky enough to co-author articles with several different people, and the nature of the partnership (perhaps no big surprise) is very different with each co-author.
I’ve been thinking that a standard lingo might be helpful here. When two potential co-authors are talking about a possible joint venture, they might want to agree ahead of time on the nature of the partnership. Partner A might propose, “Let’s write something on regulation of tropical fruit juice, and let’s use Co-Author Model X.” Then Partner B has a pretty clear picture of the proposal.
The question is, are there truly recurring types or models of co-authorship? I suspect so. There is the partnership of straight man and flamboyant (think Martin and Lewis), the partners who bring very different backgrounds and lives to the work (think Cagney and Lacey), the partnerships where one person calls the shots and delegates the work (think Jack McCoy and the ever-changing female ADA on Law and Order). Other suggestions?
Posted by Ron Wright on December 13, 2006 at 11:09 AM
Comments
There’s the VC model, where the lead author is the grantwriter and the third and fourth authors took the stuff out of the particle accelerator. I plan on making this the plan for my next article.
In law schools, a bunch of co-authors seem to be yin and yin. Similar profiles, perspectives, levels of prestige, skill sets. I think they just divy the work up. I love co-authoring, but it’s not clear to me that this model is a particularly necessary one.
Posted by: David Zaring | Dec 14, 2006 6:04:36 PM
One of my co-authors astutely suggested the 3 stooges model…
Posted by: Dan Markel | Dec 13, 2006 11:37:14 AM