Thursday, August 5, 2010

Why Not More Co-Authoring?

Readers of this Blog will be well aware of a potential danger in doing interdisciplinary scholarship: namely, not being fully versed in each of the pertinent disciplines. We can all point to examples of legal scholarship demonstrating a poor understanding of the relevant history, or of historical scholarship with a poor understanding of the workings of the law (in the period under study).
A similar problem faces law professors wanting to produce empirical legal scholarship, or (alternatively) scholarship with very sophisticated economic models. Yet in the fields of law-and-economics and empirical legal studies, articles are frequently co-authored, often in order to bring the relevant expertise to the project. This leads me to pose the question: why is there not more co-authorship in legal history?
What are your thoughts? Please post in the comments.