I've been asked to participate in a faculty program offering "a broad discussion on scholarship, including the following:
- Finding your scholarly voice;
- When and how to engage multiple literatures (including when to stop reading and start
- writing);
- When and how to seek feedback on your work, both internally and externally;
- Conferences;
- Promoting your work (e.g., through social media); and
- Submissions."
Here's what I intend to say:
When I started out as a law professor I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking deep thoughts about what I was doing. I didn’t worry much about finding my scholarly voice. I was not very intentional about picking topics. I just sort of jumped into the pool and hoped for the best. And it worked out reasonably well.
Some years later, however, I encountered George Orwell’s essay Why I Write, and discovered that it was possible to be very intentional about the process.
Orwell says there are four primary motives for writing, all of which seem to me to be relevant to the scholarly enterprise.
“(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death . . ..” We are all guilty of it, but I think we need to be conscious of the errors that it can lead to. In particular, the desire to appear brilliant. Smarter than the average bear. Which leads to works like James Joyce’s Ulysses: impenetrable masses of jargon; choosing complexity over clarity; adopting tribal mores and memes so as to be accepted.
“(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty . . . in words and their right arrangement.” When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up to be a science fiction writer. As I got older, I realized two things: (1) I can’t write dialogue and (2) the vast majority of science fiction writers make almost no money. But I still think of myself as a writer. I enjoy the process of trying to find just the right word. Of trying to be clear. Turning a good phrase. Developing a flow and rhythm to the work. And I wanted to get better. So, I studied writing as a discipline. I found some excellent books on writing. I took some seminars on writing. “Craftsman-like” is a kiss of death in a tenure letter, but I think we should all aspire to a high level of craftsmanship.
I find it odd that a lot of law professors don’t seem to enjoy the writing process. They struggle. They view it as a chore. They labor endlessly over a project. I’ve got a friend who has been working on the same law review article for what seems like the last three years. I've read multiple drafts and it's very good. Yet, my friend can’t seem to cut the cord. My friend’s an editor, not a writer.
An analogy suggests itself. On my mother’s side, her father was a carpenter. Her three brothers were carpenters. My grandfather, in particular, was an exceptionally talented woodworker. He made beautifully crafted things. And then he sent them out into the world for others to enjoy. He got them to a stage at which they were the best work he could do and then he didn’t dither over trying to make them just a little bit better. So there’s a balance to be struck between creating a work of merit and deciding that’s it’s as good as it going to get. Or, as an older friend told me when I started out, you’re going to write a lot of juvenilia. We all do. You just have to be conscious of striving for maturity.
“(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.” When I started out at Illinois, my colleague John Novak used to say that the way to get tenure at a law school was to find an obscure legal issue and beat it to death in an article that has at least 300 footnotes. Rinse and repeat. Good advice at the time; probably not today. But it’s worth remembering that we are law professors. We teach in a professional school not a graduate school. Our students will go out into that profession. Our scholarship should be accessible and useful to them. We should see the law as it is and then share that insight with our profession.
“(iv) Political purpose – using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.” Obviously, this is the reason and motivation most relevant to legal scholarship. As it should be. Yet, I think it is worth pondering the implications. We live in an increasingly tribal society. The legal profession is increasingly tribal. Even law schools show some tribalism, despite their tendency towards monoculture. Are you just writing for your tribe? Or are you trying to persuade people who reside in other tribes? Because they require different styles and choices.
Put another way, who is your audience? My scholarship got a lot better when I realized that I had a target audience and that I needed to adapt my work to reach them. So, for many years now, when I sit down to a new project, I have a specific audience in mind. It is the seven members of the Delaware Chancery Court and the five members of the Delaware Supreme Court. I see my job as writing them a letter that they will find useful and persuasive.
Find your audience and you’ll find your voice.
