THE QUEST FOR SCHOLARSHIP: THE LEGAL WRITING PROFESSOR'S PARADOX

* Assistant Professor and Director of Lawyering Skills, Southern Illinois University School of Law. B.A., Princeton University; J.D., University of Virginia School of Law. I am grateful to Mary Beth Beazley, Linda H. Edwards, Jan M. Levine, Pamela Lysaght, Suzanne Rowe, Melissa Shafer, Sheila Simon, and Craig Smith for their encouragement and suggestions for this article. [*1007] I Prologue Today I am in writing nirvana. I am in a roomy, well-lit law library carrel. There are no windows to distract my gaze, there is plenty of desk space, and there is a plug for my laptop. As long as my travel cup has a lid on it, this library’s rules allow me to enjoy a cup of coffee as I type. I am 1,100 miles away from my office, and I do not know a soul in the building. There is no phone to ring, and nobody is going to be knocking on the door every fifteen minutes. My one acquaintance at this law school, where I have gotten permission to use the library carrel, does not even know I am here yet. n1 My family is about ten miles away at the relatives’ home we are visiting for the summer, busy with their vacation activities. I have no courses to teach for the next two months, which means no lesson plans, no classroom teaching, no student conferences, no papers to critique. My summer administrative duties are streamlined, thanks to eleven years of experience in my line of work. And perhaps most important, I earned a decent enough salary during the nine-month academic [*1008] year to save some money for summer expenses, plus my law school is providing me with a summer grant for scholarship. n2 So I am not worrying about making ends meet. Finally, I have the time to write. II Inquiring Minds Want to Know This article really started three years ago, when I worked at a different law school. I attended the annual membership meeting of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) in June 1998, where I heard Professor Grace Tonner and Professor Jan Levine speak on the importance of legal writing professionals pursuing scholarship. n3 As they spoke, they stated the reasons legal writing professors sometimes gave for not writing and then debunked each of those rationales seriatim. n4 I knew they were right. I needed to write. But my inner voice kept asking, “When? When in an already full work day, which often includes doing work at night after the kids are asleep, can I find the time to write?” A few months later, I came across Professors Tonner and Levine’s ideas on the topic again, in a published essay summarizing their conference presentation. n5 Again I struggled to harmonize my total agreement of their view and the seeming impossibility of doing myself what they encouraged all legal writing professionals to do: produce more scholarship. n6 It is not that I had never done any scholarship of my own, n7 but the amount produced compared to my years teaching full time was pretty slim. [*1009] Even at that, producing it had been a struggle, cutting hours off my sleep frequently enough to make me wonder about the long term effect on my life span. n8 In truth, I had heard this call to write before, n9 but it previously was so alien to expectations about my job communicated to me by the academy at large, that I had considered it only half-heartedly. n10 I had assumed that legal scholarship was someone else’s primary responsibility. Somehow, though, the repetition of the call finally started to sink in enough to cause me to look at the matter head on, albeit with discomfort.