Lawprofblawg asks the titular question and proceeds to gaze at his (?) navel:
Why do I write law review articles? Other professors are starting to ask the same question of themselves. ...
Hence, the law professor searches for meaning in the isolating world of legal scholarship. We take to the streets to get our message out. Some write op-eds. Some write amicus briefs. Some testify before Congress and look earnest on camera as a (typically male) member of Congress explains things to us about our own field of expertise.
I’ve done all of that. And I’m not one bit happier. ...
I have teamed up with the Loyola University Chicago School of Law to host a symposium on April 6, 2018, regarding “The Future of Legal Scholarship.” The list of speakers and the agenda can be found here. I’m not suggesting scholarship doesn’t have a future, but there’s something wrong with the way we seek to measure, reward, or otherwise recognize scholarship. That’s what the program is about.
Or, as my grandfather once asked me after I bragged about my first law review article, “That’s nice. What good will it do?” Keen on making the world a better place, he would not have found my scholarly impact ranking to be a good answer. Nor would he have gushed like my grandmother if I said the purpose was to have them all listed in some law porn. The world (and law’s place in it) is far more important than the Freudian exercise of measuring how large we are in the scholarly universe.
You want to know why I write law review articles? Because it's fun. I enjoy the process of finding a puzzle, doing the research, and then I really enjoy writing it up. I love the whole process of writing. Thinking about how best to express an idea. Trying to come up with something semi-clever or funny or snarky to work into the text.
Frank Partnoy once put me on to George Orwell's essay, Why I Write, which rings so true to me to this day:
I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
I think Lawprofblawg's problem is that he thinks we should be writing for reason (iv) but most of us write for (i). (Or something.) But what if we're writing for (ii)? I don't deny that the other three motivate my work. But at the end of the day, it is the search for aesthetic pleasure in the work that drives me to sit in front of the computer.
But, you say, that only explains why I write for a living. Why write law review articles?
Okay, honestly? I write law review articles because I like to write and being a law professor pays better than being a science fiction writer (unless, I suppose, you're John Scalzi). Also, I can't write dialogue to save my life. So I found a job that pays me quite well to do something I love doing.
Which suggests that the correct question is not "Why do I write law review articles," but rather why does the taxpayer pay me to do so?
Anyway, if I could offer Lawprofblawg one word of advice, it would be to consider organizing his program around Orwell's essay.
Also, be sure to invite Frank Partnoy.
Also, give up the whole anonymity thing.
