Faculty and friends gathered on October 20 in the Edward Bennett Williams Library to celebrate the release of The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies, a 1,096-page overview of legal scholarship from around the world that has been co-edited by professor Mark Tushnet and includes contributions by him and two other Law Center faculty members.

     The volume, part of the esteemed series of Oxford Handbooks, contains 43 essays by leading legal scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Germany. The essays cover a range of topics, including property, government structure and functions, technology, business, and legal processes and research.
     Tushnet said the book demonstrates the importance of considering perspectives from around the world on common scholarly problems. The “Commonwealth” scholars seemed to take a more doctrinal approach than the more empirical, “law-in-action” approach taken by many U.S. scholars, he observed. “Working on the Handbook was quite valuable to me as a scholar,” he said. “It illuminated the range of approaches to legal scholarship taken within the worldwide scholarly community.” Tushnet, who co-edited the book with Peter Cane, a law professor at the Australian National University, also wrote a chapter on judicial review of legislation for the book’s “Citizens and Government” section.

Professor Kathy Zeiler and Associate Dean Wendy Perdue look on as Professor Mark Tushnet prepares to sign The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies, which he co-edited.

    Law Center professors Lawrence Gostin and Lisa Heinzerling also contributed chapters. Gostin, along with Phil Fennell of the Cardiff Law School (located in Wales), wrote about medicine and health for the Handbook’s “Wealth Redistribution and Welfare” section. Heinzerling contributed a chapter on the environment for its technology section.
     “Working on this project with Mark was a great experience,” Heinzerling said. “He has always been famous on our faculty for getting things done quickly and well, and I got to see this first-hand on my chapter for this book.”
     “The book is quite remarkable,” Gostin said. “The Oxford Handbook of Legal Studies is emblematic of what we strive for at Georgetown Law–incisive scholarship, comparative and international analysis, and collaborative writing.”
     Reviewing the Handbook for the Law and Politics Book Review, Albert Melone, political science professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, called it “a valuable contribution to our collective knowledge that scholars of various backgrounds and interests need to read…. It is a volume belonging in university libraries and on the shelves of serious students of law and law-related subjects everywhere.”
     Of the specific chapter Tushnet contributed, the reviewer said, “Mark Tushnet’s essay on judicial review is comparative in a way that helps us to understand the growing uses of what he terms soft and hard versions of judicial review that are currently employed around the world. This essay is theoretically focused, yet empirically oriented, with referents to how the real world works.”