For example, Professor Amy Christian, a specialist in tax law, has been invited to participate in two symposia on tax issues, one at New York Law School and the other at the University of Southern California. Professors Bitensky, Kennedy, Kuykendall, and McCormick are also frequent participants in legal symposia. Speaking invitiations from judicial groups offer special opportunities to reform the law. Professor Starnes, for example, has presented her proposal for reforming the economics of divorce at the American Bar Association's Appellate Judges Conference and will soon speak at a workshop for appellate judges in Utah. Unlike journalists who spend days or weeks on a major story, a law professor may spend as many as two years on a single journal article and even more on a book.
Footnotes can be especially time consuming.
You almost have to cite every other sentence. Professor Christian remembers the first journal article she wrote while at MSU-DCL, which contained 136 pages and 480 footnotes. For that first article, I spent one summer doing preliminary research and then did more research and writing for the next year and a half. I'd write late at night, on weekends, whenever I could find a block of time. Professor Kennedy says he conducts almost 90 percent of his research on the Internet.