Writing, Fast and Slow

Zachary Kramer's thoughtful post, "The Slow Writing Movement," brings up a broader choice between two approaches to producing legal scholarship.   Fast versus slow.  Or what I think of as the Chicago style versus the Harvard style.  

The Chicago style is to pump out a bunch of articles every year.  When you get an idea for an article, whether big or small, you write it up.  The idea is to produce a steady stream of scholarship. Not every article will be a home run.  But among your articles enough will be a hit that you'll produce a major body of influential work.  I call this the Chicago style because it is most closely associated with the traditional faculty culture at the University of Chicago Law School.  

On the other hand, the Harvard style is to write less but bigger.  You focus on quality instead of quantity, not sending out an article unless and until you think it is the definitive statement about that area of law.  You won't win any productivity awards.  But what you send out should be a signficant statement -- if not a home run, at least a double or triple.  And by focusing your efforts on really big ideas, the thinking runs, you'll produce a major body of influential work.  I call this the Harvard style because I have heard it associated with the traditional faculty culture at Harvard Law School.  

These diferences partly reflect different assumptions about what advances knowledge.   The Chicago approach makes sense if you think authors are poor at predicting what ideas will take off.   Better to write up everything and let the audience of readers decide.  There's a risk that any one article may be a dud.  But then you miss all the shots you don't take.  By putting lots of ideas out there, the thinking runs, you're making the maximum contribution to the world of ideas.  

In contrast, the Harvard approach makes sense if you think that really big articles are the ones that change the terms of the debate.  A single profound work will change how people think more than a dozen less-developed pieces.  As a result, taking your time with one big piece is better than wasting your time on lots of smaller ideas.  By giving each article a long and sustained focus, the thinking runs, you're making the maximum contribution to the world of ideas.

My own sense is that neither approach is necessarily better.  It depends on the person.  Some professors hit on ideas relatively fully formed.  For them, sitting on an article over time would just be lazy. Other professors work best by mulling over ideas over time.  For them, putting out lots of articles quickly would mean sending out articles half-baked.   And a lot of us are a mix of the two.  Some articles come out quickly Chicago-style while others come out slowly Harvard-style.   (With that said, going back to my earlier post, my recommendation for first-year professors is the same: Even if you see yourself as a Harvard-style writer over the long run, there are good reasons to start out Chicago-style.)

Finally, I should clarify that the labels "Chicago style" and "Harvard style" more accurately reflect the faculty cultures at those two schools ten or twenty years ago than today.   Lateral moves and entry-level hiring have blended the categories over time.  In particular, Harvard crossed the streams when it hired away several Chicago style professors from Chicago. An obvious example is Cass Sunstein, perhaps the epitome of the Chicago style, who probably wrote a new article during the time you read this blog post.  

(Title with apologies to Daniel Kahneman.)