To Have a Research Agenda, or Not to Have a Research Agenda: That is the Question

While at the SEALS Conference this past July, I had the pleasure of sitting in on a panel entitled: "Promoting Scholarship Within a Faculty."    Parham Williams (Chapman) moderated an excellent discussion of the topic by Paul Marcus (William & Mary), Susan Carle (American), Nancy Levit (UMKC), and Stephen Ellman (NYLS).  Each had some very creative and insightful ideas on how to promote more scholarly production and interaction on law school faculties.

One of the questions that came up after the formal presentations was whether or not it was a good idea for senior faculty to impress upon junior faculty the need to develop a fairly rigid research agenda at the beginning of their careers.  Initially, a number of both older and younger law professors spoke in favor of this approach as a way of inducing young scholars to engage in frequent research and writing and as a way of having these scholars quickly develop an area of expertise.

I then spoke and gave my contrarian view that research agendas should not be foisted upon any faculty and to do so was not only harmful to creative scholarship, but was actually counter to what we should be striving for as legal scholars.

For one thing, such agendas needlessly make the process of research and writing unnecessarily boring.  After all, who wants to be tied down and creatively suffocated by having to write about the same issues time again and for years on end?  Not  me.   This is not to say that I don't identify myself as a labor and employment law specialist, but if I had to write about employment discrimination disparate impact theory from five different angles (with apologies to Charlie Sullivan), I might do myself harm.

Maybe more fundamentally, I think having a research agenda is counter to how I see the role of a legal scholar.  In my mind, we  are  problem solvers.  I read or learn about a problem in society and I attempt to write articles that provide workable, original solutions to those problems.  To me, this practical orientation of the legal scholar is what separates us from our social science brethren and why it is essential that we should be able to move as we see fit from research topic to research topic without being wed to some larger agenda just because we're worried about not being identified as  the expert in one niche area.   Or as another person in the audience who agreed with me put it: "There should be  a move to require that scholarship actually accomplish something other than the professional advancement of the authors."

I know this take on research agendas is somewhat controversial (and I am not saying that there aren't those out there who profit from following a fairly strict research agenda), but by and large we should not insist on them.    This approach has served me well, and I can only imagine that already stressed out beginning law teachers would be much more productive scholars if they did not feel that the selection of their first piece of scholarship was so deathly important because of the number of similar papers that would thereafter have to follow.