Legal Scholarship Blog Explains Omission of Estate Planning and Related Areas

Earlier on this blog, I reported that the Legal Scholarship Blog, run by University of Pittsburgh School of Law & University of Washington School of Law, omitted the areas of Estates, Wills, Trusts, Probate, Estate Planning, and Elder Law from its list of legal scholarship categories.

I then reported that due to the efforts of Kim Dayton (Professor of Law, William Mitchell College of Law), “Elder Law” was added as a category.

Earlier today (September 9, 2007) I received an anonymous message signed only “Legal Scholarship Blog Editors” explaining the reasons behind their exclusion of other estate planning areas from their list of scholarship categories.  Here is what they said:

Links to such categories appear only when we receive relevant events, and as of the date of your post we had not received notice of any such events * * *. If you have events in the areas of Estates, Trusts & Estates, we would be happy to post them in an appropriately-named category.

Second, the blog does not reflect any judgment about your specific area of the law.  For instance, notice that we have a category of Business Law, which encompasses topics as broad and diverse as unincorporated business entities, corporations, corporate finance, corporate governance, and so on.  Similarly, for instance, notice that we have a category of Criminal Law, which encompasses topics as broad and diverse as criminal procedure, criminology, national security issues, punishment theory, sentencing, and so on.  The question of categorical breadth reflects a calculus of a variety of factors, including the number of relevant events as well as user-friendliness — but dismissiveness about an area’s distinctive contours is not such a factor.