Judges and Academic Scholarship: An Empirical Study of the Academic Publication Patterns of Federal Court and High Court Judges

Abstract

Writing articles in law reviews and other journals is an important avenue through which judge scan be heard. There are studies for North American courts that examine the publishing patterns of judges. There are, however, no studies of this sort for Australian judges. This represents a shortcoming in our understanding of how judges exercise academic leadership and interact with the legal profession in a period in which interest in the views of the judges is at an all time high. This paper represents the first empirical study of the publishing habits of Australia judges. The paper examines trends in publishing over time, which are the most popular outlets for judges, which judges publish the most and what explains differences in the number of articles which judges write.