Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA) has a thoughtful and thought-provoking post here on The Purpose(s) of Legal Scholarship. He summarizes the many different reasons that professors may write legal scholarship, including the usual suspect: getting tenure, “the desire to appear brilliant,” aiming to produce beautiful writing, assembling an historical record of sorts, and bringing about change. What especially caught my eye was his advice to legal writers be clear about who we are writing for and what our commitments are:
Unless one is merely quoting what the court said (itself a political choice), one’s analysis inevitably rests on certain normative priors. The key thing—or so it seems to me—is to be transparent about those priors. I think capitalism is superior to socialism. I think corporations are, on balance, positive social actors. I think know director primacy is superior to shareholder primacy. It would be hard to read any of my scholarship and not see those priors doing their work in the background.
And, of course, his exhortation to find the joy in writing.
Read Professor Bainbridge’s full post here.