The 100 Most Creative Moments in U.S. Law?

From the Law Librarian Blog:

Robert F. Blomquist’s (Professor of Law/Swygert Research Fellow, Valparaiso) Thinking About Law and Creativity: On the 100 Most Creative Moments in American Law [download from SSRN or ABA Journal] is a very interesting article as long as you do not take Blomquist’s act of ranking creative moments in American law too seriously. If you did take the ranking seriously you would have to note his bias for environmental law. You would have to question why Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Charles Reich’s The Greening of America (1972) ranks higher than Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law (1973) and why Berle and Means’ The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932) fails to appear in the ranking while Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance (1992) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006) do appear in the Top 100.

. . . what makes Blomquist’s article interesting is the project itself, the attempt to articulate America’s most creative legal moments to “energize and clarify our synoptic thinking about the nature of legal creativity.” In it he identifies, court decisions, executive actions, specific statutes, legislative programs, landmark articles, books, and events in legal education. He offers brief justifications for his selections and their placement in his ranking but I think the use of a numerical ranking system as an organizing device is too artificial and constrains his commentary; a matrix or web of law with major and minor nodes for the layering of law’s creative moments might be better way to perform this sort of intellectual archeology.