Need Scholarship Advice? Ask LawProfBlawg (A Miss Manners-Like Advice Column)

Here's some advice that any law professor can appreciate: Don’t listen to people who say happiness comes from within. They aren’t in academia.

Dear LawProfBlawg,

I’m a newly-tenured law professor. I’m feeling very insecure lately. Sure, I’ve googled myself and looked at how many Westlaw citations I have, but I just don’t feel good about myself. What can I do to get the external validation I crave to show I’m a great scholar?

Apprehensive in Academia

Dear Apprehensive,

Welcome to the world of legal scholarship! You’re wondering WHY you are spending so much time working on your law review articles and whether it is making a difference, or whether you’re just killing trees. You’ve come to the point in your career in which, for some reason, you stopped drinking the Kool-Aid and are now wondering the point of the exercise. Fear not! I can get you back on the Kool-Aid track.

The first thing you have to remember is the wise words of Omar from the Wire: It’s all in the game. If Omar were a law professor, he would, for sure, set up his own rules of the game. He would reject whatever standard was in place and make what he was doing the standard. That’s what we call courage tenure.

Here are the traditional ways to measure your scholarly impact:

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    1. Citations. This is really a good way to measure your scholarly impact if you are a big dog in a large field. If you write in water law, it’s probably a no go. However, if you have a large group of friends, you can cite each other’s work and engage in the most massive Ponzi scheme ever. Or maybe it’s better to call it a scholarship “bubble.”

It also works if your law students have glommed on to your article to fill in citation gaps. Then you can claim that many famous people have cited your work, even if it was really just put in there by a student. See how this works?

  1. Ranking of the law review. If you’ve published a lot in top-tier law reviews, highlight that fact! Your articles are “well placed,” and suggest something about the level of your scholarship compared to others. Highlight it. Sure, some naysayers will claim that students pick the articles and it isn’t a good measure of quality, but they are just jealous. Judge Posner still writes for law reviews, all the while criticizing them. Embrace the positive aspects of the rankings. Bonus points if you write an article criticizing law reviews and then leverage it up to a top-10 law review.
    1. Social Science Research Network downloads. Maybe the best way to judge scholarship is through the number of times people seek it out and download it, presumably to read it. There are even blogs that will show if you are one of the top 10 downloads in your field. Of course, one would expect to see that translate into citations, but don’t bother trying to draw the line between downloads and citations.

On the other hand, if you don’t make the SSRN grade, make sure you get all your friends to download your article once every few days.

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And why not go even further? Make your own category of law, and write 10 articles on the topic. You could corner the entire top 10 downloads in your subgenre on SSRN!

    1. Go rogue. There is no reason you have to play by the rules of others. Make your own rules!

Maybe “interdisciplinary” research is your thing. Highlight your peer-reviewed citations, dismissing those silly student-run journals. Or be a “public intellectual” and write op-eds and otherwise engage the masses.

Or maybe you like writing books. You have several book contracts with different University Presses. Highlight the fact you have drilled down even deeper into a subject than is possible in a law review article.

There is no reason you shouldn’t win at this game and feel good about yourself.

Don’t forget your speaking engagements. Accept all of them, no matter how exhausted you are, so that you show how prominent you are in your sliver of academia. If you do it right, you and your friends (who are in the same field) can set up a reciprocal scheme such that everyone gets a prestigious invite, talking about the same things repeatedly.

All these things will make you feel so much better about yourself, because you’ll have that external validation you crave. Don’t listen to people who say happiness comes from within. They aren’t in academia.

In short, by marketing what you are doing as the standard, you can demonstrate, by definition, you are an excellent scholar!

Notice that NOT ONE of my suggestions require anything of your work! It doesn’t at all require you to make the world a better place, interact with those NON-scholars such as judges or legislatures, or influence law. Judges, Congress, or state legislatures don’t have to read or adopt your positions. It’s a completely closed system! NO ONE HAS TO READ WHAT YOU WROTE AT ALL FOR YOU TO BE A SUCCESS.

You’re welcome,

LawProfBlawg


LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter (@lawprofblawg). Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.