A few days ago, I quoted Fred Rodell's 1936 article, Goodbye to Law Reviews, and said I'm sorely tempted, at this stage of my career, to eschew law review articles for other forms of scholarship and writing. I asked if this seemed like a crazy idea.
This post has generated a surprisingly high number of responses, here and elsewhere, as well as emails sent directly to me. On the "am I crazy" question, I'd say there's a hung jury, and interestingly, it seems to be divided in part based on career stage. A lot of the untenured appear to regard the notion of abandoning student-edited law reviews with great suspicion, and thus think I'm crazy; the more senior folks seem more sanguine about the idea that there is life beyond law reviews and have a moderately higher opinion of my sanity.
I'd have expected the reverse, but more and more I think I am not very good at predictions. In any case, to clarify a couple of things that were perhaps ambiguous in the original post, I am not proposing to abandon legal scholarship or even the writing of scholarly articles. I am proposing to end the ludicrous ritual of writing pieces longer than necessary, duller than necessary, and more heavily footnoted than necessary, then spending an agonizing few weeks waiting for second and third-year law students to decide if my articles measure up to their mysterious standards, then trying to "trade up," then going through months of tedious multiple edits before the pieces are finally published in a forum that very few people will read, even in my own field. (More after the jump).
Let me hasten to add some caveats and disclaimers:
1) No, it's not the students' fault. They're behaving reasonably and appropriately within structures they've inherited. And, needless to say, though I've had some atrocious experiences with student editors, I have also worked with some excellent student editors. (Including the terrific students at Chicago who very charitably published my last idiosyncratic piece).
2) Yes, I imagine I'll still publish in student-edited law reviews, but I think I'll let them the law reviews ask me for pieces, should they ever wish to do so.
3) No, I'm not swearing off peer-reviewed journals, though they scare me, since it's harder to fool your peers than it is to fool law students.
But to chime into the broader debate: I don't see why there should be an inherent contradiction between "advancing scholarship," whatever it is we mean by that, and "reaching a broader audience." If the two appear to be irreconcilable goals, then something is deeply wrong with both academic and public discourse -- and part of our job, surely, is to change that.
This is a very useful clarification. You did leave it notably ambiguous on a central question: were you going to abandon scholarship and become a "public intellectual" exclusively, whatever that is.
This clarification surely quells any skepticism about the choice to abandon scholarship I offered at Prawfs, which was dancing around this central ambiguity in your previous post.
Posted by: Ethan Leib | January 20, 2006 at 01:38 PM
A fine post. As one of those untenured commenters, I'd say the hung jury doesn't necessarily divide as neatly between junior and senior profs as you suggested. It seems to me the general response was one of "supportive in principle, ambivalent in practce," and that this characterized the reactions of both senior faculty and junior faculty (myself included; although I was critical on all sorts of points, I don't think I denied the possibility of your attempted approach working). Perhaps the difference is that we junior faculty have enough time, or enough desire to find additional writing outlets, that we find ourselves endlessly parsing every aspect of an argument rather than just stating the point!
I think your last paragraph is the interesting one, and the one that most invites reaction, whether from me or from others with more time. I don't think the two (advancing scholarship and reaching a broader public audience) are inherently contradictory, or genuinely irreconcilable, but then those are pretty high standards. I think, though, that they are -often- not capable of achievement at the same time and in the same writing -- and I'm not sure there's anything surprising or worrisome or wrong about that. One reason for this, of course, is the very factor that often leads to criticism of law review articles and their length: that instead of jumping into a debate, one is obliged to spend time introducing and recapitulating much of that debate (although the results are different in the two different media: it conduces to triteness in popular work, and excess length and footnotery in law review scholarship). More generally, I don't think it's surprising that one might be forced to bring different tools, different vocabulary, and so forth to bear in addressing these two different audiences, and so it's not alarming about either public or scholarly discourse to say that, sometimes but not always, it is difficult to serve both at the same time. To take a rarefied example, I imagine Steven Hawking or Brian Greene can further scholarship more easily in their fields when writing in the language of their fields, and for their natural audiences, than they do when they simply popularize their ideas for general audiences. Again, though, I enjoyed both this post and its predecessors and am loving the blog.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | January 20, 2006 at 03:18 PM
I meant to comment on this thread, but commented on a different one by accident on this topic, so here is the link:
http://lawculture.blogs.com/lawculture/2006/01/whoa_books_are_.html#comment-13090735
Posted by: Jordan | January 21, 2006 at 12:11 PM