Smith on Tenure Advice

One of the interesting things about watching junior profs (or prawfs, I suppose) grow up on the blogosphere is that our subject matters are slowly changing.  After years of repetitive and semi-narcissistic posts about what it's like to start teaching, how to be a junior scholar, etc., we can look forward to years of repetitive and semi-narcissistic posts about getting tenure, evaluating others' tenure bids -- and, I suppose, eventually posts about how midlife crises for academics aren't as fun as they were in the free-wheeling 70s, about lumbago and how it affects classroom performance, and about the risks of blogging as an emeritus professor.

Case in point -- and I should add that the above paragraph was meant to mock the Prawfsblawg crowd and especially myself, not him -- Gordon Smith has a fine post at the Conglomerate offering advice for young law scholars about how to write for tenure, based on his own duties filling out external tenure evaluations.  They're all pretty sensible suggestions -- build a coherent scholarly identity; don't write too narrowly, but pick questions you can actually answer; quality over quantity; market yourself.  At CoOp, Dan Solove emphasizes Smith's advice to write about "one new idea per article."

All good advice, to be sure.  I do want to add another piece of advice to leaven Smith and Solove's suggestions.  My fear is that, despite a solid decade now of legal scholars writing, for better or worse, about the value and peril of heuristics, junior scholars, who can be as insecure and hidebound as more senior legal scholars, will treat these rules of thumbs too literally.  I think there is still room to remind junior scholars of this: follow your muse!  That doesn't mean that you shouldn't be self-critical, or that you should fail utterly to listen to the advice of more senior scholars, whether colleagues at your school or others; maybe your muse is misleading you, and in any event it takes time and experience to learn to follow your muse effectively, and you shouldn't expect to do everything at once.  But if, after really thinking about it, your best judgment tells you to break any of these "rules" -- to write about different subjects, to write something that may be a tad too ambitious, to write more than just one big piece a year, to write a piece with two or more new ideas -- then just do it. 

As in writing, so in your scholarly career: it's important to learn the "rules," but it's also important that you figure out when to break them, and show enough backbone to do so.  The only thing you risk losing is tenure.  But, quite frankly, tenure generally isn't the biggest hurdle in the legal academy, for better or worse, so there's no point being unduly paranoid about it; and if that tenure is really going to be worth anything, you ought to be willing to risk it at least a little.  I should hope that we all decided to pursue legal scholarship for a reason, and that the reason wasn't just job security; so pursue it.