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.
It sounds like you could change the title to “The purposes of building model airplanes”. The question is the social utility of paying for tenured faculty to spend 40% of their time (as is standard for accounting for tenured-faculty time) to write law review articles. That it is personally satisfying is a non-answer. I think it is hard on a societal basis to justify the amount of legal scholarship that is produced every year. Many of those spending time writing law review articles could probably better serve society (and the states paying their salaries) by teaching more. That is a belief against self-interest. I benefit from the current regime! Maybe the trick is to argue that publishing law review articles makes one a better law teacher by requiring you to stay up on legal developments. The problem with that argument, or one of them, is that it is possible to publish law review articles without spending any time mastering current legal developments.