A pity this interesting idea has been raised during the Marianne Jennings controversy.  I have long agreed with Connie that the Academy should publish a management style journal on legal issues.  Since we all teach in business schools, I would place such a journal as a higher priority than a law school style journal.  I think the ABLJ currently appeals to few if any of our management colleagues and that is one reason why they don't appreciate what we have to offer to management education.  

As far as an interest group at AOM, I also agree that is a great idea.  At the American Marketing Association, we have had a special interest group in marketing and society for something like 7 years (my memory fades).  I am currently the legal representative on the board of directors of the special interest group and this is the second time I have served in such capacity.  As the title suggests, this group is much broader than just legal issues in marketing, but also includes ethics, social responsibility, social marketing and other broad and sometimes critical views of marketing.  

The Marketing and Society Interest group formed after the American Marketing Association acquired the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, which continues to welcome marketing law articles, but presented in a management rather than law review format.  Again the journal is broader than just law and includes articles on ethics and consumer behavior research with a public policy orientation (e.g., do labels communicate information effectively to consumers?).  The journal also in integrative in the sense that it does want articles that do sophisticated legal analysis, while avoiding the minutiae of law review articles, combined with an interesting discussion of the managerial --marketing implications of the analysis and in most cases an analysis of public policy issues, possible policy changes, and areas of future research.  The struggle for JPP&M and any specialty journal such as a new Legal Issues of Management Journal is to make sure its appeal is sufficiently broad that it is read by specialists who are otherwise subscribing and reading journals in their narrow area of interest.  

So while a law interest group at AOM is a great idea, it is worth pondering whether there is a broader coalition of interests (ethics etc) that might be included in such a group to give it broader appeal?

Ross Petty

Professor of Marketing Law

Babson College



	-----Original Message----- 

	From: Academy of Legal Studies in Business (ALSB) Talk on behalf of Constance E. Bagley 

	Sent: Fri 9/3/2004 4:18 PM 

	To: [log in to unmask] 

	Cc: 

	Subject: Formation on Law and MGT Interest Group at AOM

	

	

	Dear colleagues,

	

	This is to follow up on the idea I floated by the attendees at my Creating and Teaching Harvard-Style Cases Symposium of forming a Law and Management Interest Group at the Academy of Mgt. Michael Hitt and Vance Fried raised this possibility last year and I am simply doing what I can to move it forward. 

	

	Having been tenure-track at HBS for four years now, I am more convinced than ever that we need to better integrate the work business law scholars do with the mainstream management disciplines. Wharton, of course, has led this approach since  Mr. Wharton insisted at the time the school was founded that business law be one of the five areas of required study. And we all know of the strong business law groups at Texas, Michigan, Indiana, Florida, Babson and elsewhere. But there are many schools where there is only one business law prof or no tenure-line business law faculty and only adjuncts, including Stanford, Dartmouth and Yale. The ALSB leaders have done an incredible job keeping law in the required courses for accreditation, but I think that we need to do more to demonstrate the relevance of our work to management scholarship and practice. I think that we all are a bit tired of being asked, as I was during my interim tenure review at HBS, to explain why we belong at a business school.

	

	I believe that an important way to achieve this would be to form a law and management interest group at the AOM. Indeed, I have dreams of our starting a new peer-reviewed journal -- The Journal of Law and Management --  as a vehicle for publishing the excellent work we and our colleagues do.  I realize that in many schools, law reviews are seen as the appropriate vehicle for the dissemination of scholarly research, but at HBS, at least, there is pressure to go more mainstream and publish in management journals, such as Acad of Mgt Review and Acad of Mgt Journal.  As I mentioned to several of you, I am working on a piece now that I plan to submit to the Acad Mgt Rev. I realize that it is a long-shot, but I'm giving it my best. As The American Business Law Reporter has apparently moved closer to the law review model of articles, the need for such an outlet is all the more important. Perhaps such a journal could be jointly sponsored by the ALSB and (assuming we can create one) the AOM law and mgt interest group.

	

	Pls let me know what you think, either directly at [log in to unmask] or, given what may be broad interest in this topic, the ALSB talk line.

	

	Have a great Labor Day weekend.

	

	Connie Bagley

	

	

	

	

	



	Constance E. Bagley

	Associate Professor of Business Administration

	Harvard Business School

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	Boston  MA 02163

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	Assistant: Mark Lamoureux

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