I am currently at work on a short essay that builds off of my director primacy model of corporate governance. Instead of rehearsing the whole argument for director primacy, which I have done elsewhere and often, I propose in the current essay simply to say "As I have argued elsewhere," and then very briefly state the thesis. A friend and fellow academic objects, saying that this device is disfavored because one should assume that the reader of your current article has not read everything you have ever done. Said reader, moreover, the friend opined, will be annoyed by being directed to another source.
This sent me to Westlaw. The phrase "As I have argued elsewhere" appears in 2,601 secondary sources including 2580 law review articles. The most frequently cited article in which it appears is by no less a scholar that Larry Tribe. His article Trial by Mathematics: Precision and Ritual in the Legal Process, 84 Harv. L. Rev. 1329, 1372 (1971), has been cited 765 times. Mark Tushnet comes in second with 656 citations to his article Following the Rules Laid Down: A Critique of Interpretivism and Neutral Principles, 96 Harv. L. Rev. 781, 823 (1983). Geoffrey Stone comes in third with 648 citations to Content Regulation and the First Amendment, 25 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 189, 242 (1983).
Finding myself in such eminent (if ideologically suspect) company, I have decided to press forward.
