Food Law & Policy: An Essential Part of Today’s Legal Academy
Food Law & Policy has matured into a vital and vibrant field in the legal academy. That’s the conclusion reached by an exciting new article, Food Law & Policy: An Essential Part of Today’s Legal Academy, published recently by the Journal of Food Law & Policy. The article updates a seminal 2014 Wisconsin Law Review article, Food Law & Policy: The Fertile Field’s Origins and First Decade by Baylen Linnekin and Emily Broad Leib, two of the Academy of Food Law & Policy’s founding board members.
That article was the first to detail the fascinating origins and explosive growth of the field from its beginnings in the mid-2000s. The new Journal of Food Law & Policy article, also by Broad Leib and Linnekin, presents fresh data on the steady growth of the field since publication of the pair’s Wisconsin Law Review article in 2014.
Using the same ten criteria the authors developed to measure the growth of Food Law & Policy for the 2014 article, the Journal of Food Law & Policy article measures and details the field’s growth since that time. The field’s continued growth—along with its firm footing within the legal academy—is one of the new article’s key findings.
For example, the 2014 article determined that 20 of the top-100 law schools had offered Food Law & Policy courses. The new article identifies 34 such schools that have offered courses—including, in some cases, multiple course offerings. That’s a seventy-percent increase in just four years.
The new article also reveals several other equally compelling data points. For example, the 2014 article identified one dedicated Food Law & Policy clinic at a law school, along with thirty clinics at twenty-three laws schools that had pursued one or more Food Law & Policy projects. The new article shows that four schools now boast dedicated Food Law & Policy clinics, and that nearly six-dozen clinics at four-dozen law schools have now worked on one or more Food Law & Policy projects. Finally, while the 2014 article identified seven (of 10) areas of a legal field that Food Law & Policy had occupied, the new Journal of Food Law & Policy article demonstrates that Food Law & Policy now meets all ten such criteria.
The field’s continued growth is truly impressive. If you would like to help sustain this growth, please consider becoming a member of the Academy of Food Law & Policy today!