Law new is the notion that legal firms can offer the kind of comprehensive services some clients need while remaining within the primary focus of their business. Often these services involve helping the elderly, those suffering from mental health issues and others with complex needs.
A well thought out plan involving law new techniques can allow firms to meet these clients’ needs without having to make significant investments in staff or infrastructure. This approach can also help them to generate additional revenue and improve client satisfaction.
The term “law new” has been used to describe a movement in legal scholarship, but its exact meaning remains somewhat elusive. Some observers believe that it is a call to transform legal scholarship into social science or public policy, but such a shift would change the relationship between law and other disciplines but not the structure of legal academics — the training and institutional organization.
More generally, the “law new” idea is a call to recognize that the practice of law has changed and that legal scholars should try to keep up. To do this, they will need to move beyond the analytical perspective that characterizes much of current legal scholarship and adopt a more pragmatic perspective.
As this happens, legal scholarship will need to adopt the thinking process and mode of reasoning that characterizes mod ern legislative and administrative decisionmakers. These decisionmakers look less for solutions that are intellectually coherent with a pattern of previous decisions and more for ones that effec tively achieve specific policy goals.
Decisionmakers also look less for principles that apply to all situations and more for those that are best suited to a particular circumstance. For example, the administration of a federal program may be guided by general policies governing government administration and oversight but that program will also be shaped by the particular needs of the program’s target group.
This reorientation toward instrumental thinking explains why, in contrast to the rhetorical flourishes of treatises, contemporary academic writing about law is more like a series of memos to the administrators and legislators of the day. Courts intercede in this modem lawmaking process less frequently than casebooks suggest and only in a supervisory capacity, declaring that the administrators violated a statute or the Constitution rather than citing transcendental principles.
Despite this shift in the nature of law, legislators and administrators continue to take considerable initiative. They may respond to specific situations by proposing a new statute or by adopting an entirely new policy. Similarly, new public law scholar ship must display this initiative in framing prescriptions. This means that it must anticipate issues and propose statutory or administrative solutions, not merely suggest alternative judicial reasoning.