Scholarly Writing For...Whom?

If I may add a link and two cents to Ethan's post below about Rosa Brooks's farewell to law reviews, and the useful discussion that's ensued here and on her blog.... 

First, a link.  Folks who are interested in this discussion, and in the earlier discussion here and there about blogging and legal scholarship, might enjoy Scott McLemmee's latest column for Inside Higher Ed, in which he writes about his experience meeting a number of blogging academics before and during the annual MLA conference, and ties it in to one scholar's broader work on the social history and culture of academic life.  McLemee quotes the scholar, Thomas Bender, as writing:

Academe is threatened by the twin dangers of fossilization and scholasticism (of three types: tedium, high tech, and radical chic). The agenda for the next decade, at least as I see it, ought to be the opening up of the disciplines, the ventilating of professional communities that have come to share too much and that have become too self-referential.

McLemee naturally sees blogs as offering the possibility of Bender's project realized: the creation of a "new sort of collegiality, stretching across both geographic and professional distances, fostered by online communication but not confined to it."  Maybe.  It is this promise of a broader, more heterogeneous and status-insensitive dialogue among and between scholars that offers one of the reasons that young legal scholars continue blogging (not why they start, I think; I would guess that a combination of excess energy, limited outlets, ego, and healthy self-interest offer a better explanation of that).  It seems to me that's one reason Brooks wants to opt out of the law review world, as evidenced by her observation that law review articles seemingly go ignored, and her query in the comments to her post: "Who are any of us writing to, and what for?"  I suppose in that sense that blogging offers an alternative to long-form, long-wait-for-reaction legal scholarship -- although most of the time it is an imperfect scholarship; most blog entries are neither as long nor as thoughtful as some of the entries on, say, Richard Posner or Larry Solum's blogs, which stand in for longer-term scholarship and evoke immediate reactions.  So, if McLemee is right, then blogging is at least one outlet that might be preferable in certain senses for law professors who long for more of a vivid and immediate and unconstrained dialogue than law-review scholarship can provide.  But I think there are even broader questions of professional identity tied in with the questions Brooks asks.  (More after the jump...)

Now, it seems to me that the answer to Brooks's question -- who do we law professors write to and why? -- is that we write legal scholarship largely for ourselves and largely because it is part of the role orientation of law professors -- and, usually, for no other or better reason.  It is what we do, what we like, who we are, and that's that.  To quote Rodell, "diddling while Rome burn[s]" is a perfectly adequate description of legal scholarship; whatever some legal scholars may tell themselves or others, legal scholarship is generally not about "solving the myriad of problems of the world" -- it's about doing what legal scholars do.  Except in some utilitarian sense, that's just fine or, at least, just life.  Some may find this perspective a little grim; I'm not sure I really do. 

But the converse point of this argument is that if someone is not especially jazzed by this part of the role identity of being a legal scholar, that's fine with me and there ought to be room to make other approaches work in the academy.  (Brooks suggests she might switch to academic books, among other things.  If so, that's an acceptable substitute for journal-writing, but it should be noted that it carries at least some of the costs -- the need for punctilious detail and the unlikelihood that anyone will read the work -- that journal articles carry, and that Brooks complains about in that context, so I'm not sure why she finds this alternative distinctly preferable.)  Not all alternatives should be equally preferable to an academic who enjoys the benefits of tenure, however.  If one became purely a writer of newspaper columns or of lightly reasoned books for general audiences, it seems less likely that one would be adequately fulfilling one's obligation to contribute to the scholarly leg of the tenure tripod (and, by extension, of post-tenure academic life).  If that's one's preference, why not surrender tenure and exist by the whims of the marketplace?  Nevertheless, there do seem to be a number of acceptable alternatives to pure journal-article writing for those who are so inclined.   

I do get the sense, though, that there is a broader risk (at least from the ponit of view of the rest of the academy) inherent in the temptation to slip the bonds and outlets of standard academic discourse altogether.  There is, however fitfully from an individual scholar's point of view, a broader intellectual conversation that takes place in the legal academy.  It may from an individual's point of view occur at glacial speeds, and it may ultimately serve no ultimate purpose larger than itself, but it does occur.  It's hardly surprising that this conversation, to the extent it is somewhat formalized and constrained as professional and somewhat discipline-specific conversation, takes place through standard accepted channels of communication -- law reviews, books in academic presses, conference talks -- and not others, such as newspapers.  Just about all conversations require at least some miminum conventions in order to take place.  And therein lies the risk. 

My rough conclusion is that some legal academics who exit these standard modes of communication simply exit the academic conversation altogether (again, with the caveat that I think folks who write books for academic presses are basically just offering a substitute for writing journal articles and remain in the academic conversation).  Columbia, my alma mater, seemed to offer a few prominent examples of this.  For instance, Patricia Williams may vastly prefer writing for the Nation, but is she any longer a prominent part of the legal academy conversation as such?  And greater or lesser variants on this phenomenon -- legal scholars who tire of legal scholarship as a writing outlet but also effectively become "dehors de la conversation" -- are, I think, sufficiently widespread that folks at most schools could probably name a similar individual at their institution, albeit sotto voce.

As I say, that's fine.  There are all kinds of reasons one might prefer a "conversation" with a general audience, or an audience of politicians and opinion-makers, or an audience of non-academic lawyers, or an intellectual but non-academic and generalist audience, and so on.  I do get the sense that it is possible for legal academics who opt to write largely or strictly in other fora to drop off the face of the earth as legal academics, but that's not the same thing as saying that they have actually dropped off the face of the earth; to the contrary, from their perspective they may have entered a newer and larger world.  But it is a different world, and the question is, how much enthusiasm do some of these dropouts from the tedious world of academe have for those aspects of the old one?

I hasten to add that these reflections were inspired by Brooks (and Ethan), and are not about her.  Let me not be so presumptuous!  In particular, I have no idea what mix of audiences she would like to address in the future, and through what media; and if those media include books for academic presses, then, as I've emphasized, such outlets would be well within the academic conversation.  I emphasize that these thoughts are freestanding and not about Brooks one last time because I end with this question, which I raised parenthetically above.  Say one is a tenured academic who wants to get out of pure scholarship altogether -- to continue teaching, but to write strictly for non-academic audiences, whether in the daily press or for magazines or in general-audience books.  Should such a person retain tenure?  Why?  And even if the university cannot revoke their tenure in these circumstances, would it behoove the tenured individual himself or herself to voluntarily surrender his or her tenure?*

* All questions posed herein are hypothetical; the author hereby disclaims any reader's right to hold this sentence against him in the future if he attains tenure but chooses to write for general audiences.