The Faculty Lounge

The Ethics of Forwarding an Outside Colleague's Paper to One's Home Law Review

In an old Ethicist column from 2018 at the New York Times, Kwame Anthony Appiah (NYU) addressed a reader's question about the practice of asking one's law faculty friends at other schools to forward the "outsider's" paper to the student law review editors at the recipient's home institution. Here's an excerpt from the reader's question:

In recent years, a practice has developed in which authors send their manuscripts to friends on other law faculties and ask them to recommend their paper for publication to the editors of their school’s law journal. Law students understandably feel pressure to defer to the professors who give them grades and who are far more experienced.

I don’t know how common the practice is, though I suspect that many authors who submit to law reviews are unaware of it. On the positive side, the practice means that a professor vets the article. And it is no different from the common practice of using your connections to get ahead. * * *

In short, to the extent law-review placements are thought to be a statement about the quality of the article — a view that, despite what I say above, I find hard to shake in myself — a result of this practice is that placements may send a misleading signal about the article. That has not stopped me from engaging in it once or twice. Did I behave unethically? Is it relevant that students are involved?

Appiah's response doesn't quite address the reader's question (and I myself am not sure if the reader was a sender or a forwarder of the law review article), but here's Appiah's take:

As you’ve made clear, the practice of faculty recommendation puts pressures on law-review editors that may involve the abuse of power, temptations to toady and a host of other unfortunate effects. . . . [S]ome meliorative steps can be taken. Law reviews could adopt an explicit policy that they will not consider articles sent to them via the faculty of their own institution. Indeed, they could simply circulate a letter to their own faculty asking them not to do this. 

H/T Leandra Lederman.

Over on Twitter (here), Leandra Lederman (Indiana Maurer) explains her policy of declining any requests to forward colleagues' articles to her home institution's law review, for fear of putting the proverbial "thumb on the scale for a friend," thereby putting uncomfortable pressure on students.

My guess is that practices and views depend on multiple variables, including the relative "rank" of the sender's and receiver's home institutions (and associated issues of perceived prestige or quality) in some cases. It's a tricky issue, for sure. Until reading the thread on Twitter, I hadn't considered the unintended pressure that these sorts of forwards might place on the receiving student editors vis-à-vis the faculty at their school. Again, that may depend on many factors, but the student perspective makes me think about the issue in a new way.

 

Continue reading the main story

 

 

Scholastica Data on 2020 Submissions

Scholastica has made available here information about the submissions made via that platform in 2020. A few facts caught my eye:

"Only 35% of law reviews using Scholastica actively open/close submissions across the year – the other 65% remain open for submissions year-round, much like traditional peer-reviewed journals that have year-round rolling review."

Technically speaking, it may be that 65% of the law reviews remain "open" year-round on Scholastica, but this does not mean the journals are accepting/reading submissions. Anecdotally speaking (aka based onto the abyss into which I have sent several articles), my sense is that the 65% number does not mean that 65% of journals are open. Rather, a large number of journals just haven't clicked the button to indicate that they are full/not accepting/not reading. Perhaps from the journal's perspective, staying open means it may receive an off-season gem. More likely, it's a financial gain for Scholastica in the form of fees paid on articles submitted and never read.

"The majority of articles, around 80% in total, are sent to law reviews in the six weeks following February 1 and the six weeks following August 1."

Familiar news, but always interesting to see the underlying data in graphic form (from here):

And finally:

"Most decisions are made from February to the end of April and then August through the end of October – though there are still some decisions made outside those periods."

Here's Scholastica's graphic on when the journals make decisions:

This seems to follow conventional wisdom that the February cycle is more active than the August one, but that there still remains a fall cycle.

A few years ago, Brian Galle posted some reflections (over here, on Medium). His assessment? "[T]he fall sucks...only about a third of acceptances happen in the fall." The fall cycle does appear less robust than the February cycle.

All obvious to many experienced submitters, but helpful data for those newer to the process.

Updated Guide to Submitting to Specialty Law Reviews and Journals in Gender, Women & Sexuality

I’ve updated this guide to submitting to 29 specialty law reviews and law journals classified by the W&L Law Journal Rankings under the subject  “Gender, Women and Sexuality,” as well as  5 additional journals with the word “gender” in the title. 

The document contains information about word count limitations, submission details, whether the HeinOnline Law Journal Library indexes the journal’s articles, and other guidelines authors may find relevant when considering sending their work to specialty law reviews in Gender, Women & Sexuality.

Details vary widely from journal to journal. Not all journals accept unsolicited contributions (or are still in existence!).

Corrections, additions, refinements are very welcome.

Updated Guide to Submitting Essays, Commentaries, Reviews to Online Law Review Companions

I've updated and expanded my guide to submitting to online law review companions at 60 law schools. It is here on SSRN. 

As before, the document contains information about word count limitations, subject matter preferences, submission details and other guidelines authors may find relevant when considering sending their work to law review presences online. There's a column indicating whether the online companion articles are included in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

Corrections, additions, refinements to this chart are always welcome.

 

Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award: Call for Submissions

Bumping this to the front in anticipation of the July 1, 2020 deadline.

The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is pleased to announce the competition for its inaugural Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  This paper competition is open to all full-time law professors with five (5) or fewer years of full-time law teaching experience as of July 1, 2020. The deadline for submissions is July 1, 2020.

The purpose of the award is to encourage and recognize excellent legal scholarship related to women, gender and the law.  The work chosen for the Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award should make a substantial contribution to legal literature and reflect original research and/or major developments in previously reported research.

Papers will be reviewed on a blind basis by a committee comprised of four members of the Haub Law faculty with expertise in this area: Bridget Crawford, Darren Rosenblum, Noa Ben-Asher and Emily Gold Waldman.  The winner of the competition will be invited to present the paper to selected students and faculty at Haub Law (located in White Plains, NY) during the 2020-2021 academic year, with reasonable travel expenses paid.

ELIGIBILITY:

• All persons who have held full-time teaching positions for five (5) or fewer full academic years as of July 1, 2020 are eligible for consideration.
• There is no subject-matter limitation for submissions, as long as the paper relates in some way to women, gender, and the law.
• Jointly authored papers are accepted as long as each author independently meets the eligibility requirements.

PUBLICATION COMMITMENTS/LIMITATIONS:

• There is no publication commitment associated with the competition. 
• Papers are eligible regardless of whether they were published prior to submission date, are scheduled to be published after the submission date, or are not yet under submission.
• Each applicant is limited to one (1) entry.
• There are no page-length or word-count limitations.
• All publications (including scholarly articles, book chapters, legal briefs and other writings) are eligible for consideration.

SUBMISSION:

• We will accept submissions for the Emerging Scholar Award from April 1, 2020, through July 1, 2020. The winner will be announced by August 30, 2020.
• To participate, please email your article, redacted as necessary to preserve anonymity (for the blind grading process), as a portable data file (PDF) to Judy Jaeger, Senior Staff Associate, at jjaeger@law.pace.edu with the subject line “Emerging Scholar Award.”
• Please include in the body of the email your name, institutional affiliation and confirmation that you meet the eligibility requirements.
• Unredacted papers will not be considered.

Information on Emerging Scholar Award and the Elisabeth Haub School of Law

This is the inaugural year of the Elisabeth Haub School of Law’s Women, Gender & the Law Emerging Scholar Award.  The law school at Pace University is one of a small number of schools in the United States named after a woman, and we are proud of our school’s long-standing commitment to gender justice.

Since the establishment of the Women’s Justice Center in 1991, Haub Law has made gender justice a priority.  Students have the ability to pursue a concentration in Women, Gender & the Law, through which they develop skills and strategies for effective representation and advocacy for gender justice, regardless of what career they pursue.  The Haub Law faculty includes nationally-recognized academic experts and advocates for gender justice. Our faculty teach, research and write about gender equality and justice as it relates to constitutional law, corporate law, criminal law, education, environmental law, estate planning, juvenile justice, legal theory, poverty, public health, social media, and taxation, to name just a few areas.  An important hallmark of Haub Law is that in addition to our specialty classes that focus on gender, issues involving gender are also integrated into a wide range of other courses.

AALS Faculty Focus Webinars for Early Career Faculty

Posted at the request of the AALS:

AALS Faculty Focus Webinars for Early Career Faculty

AALS is launching a webinar series, Faculty Focus, to address some of the challenges brought on by COVID-19 that might be particularly disruptive for early career tenure-track, clinical, and legal writing faculty.

The first series of topics will focus on how faculty might best allocate their time this summer, beginning with Work-Life Balance and the Demands of Scholarship, Tuesday, June 9 at 4 pm ET/1 pm PT.

Hosted by deans Darby Dickerson (UIC John Marshall) and Vincent Rougeau (Boston College), Faculty Focus webinars will be held every Tuesday afternoon. Each 60-minute webinar will feature expert advice from law school leaders followed by shared experiences from early career law faculty. The sessions will be structured to encourage conversation and connection, as well as provide opportunities for participants to crowdsource solutions and discuss common issues across schools and teaching areas.

Details and registration information can be found on the AALS Faculty Focus webpage at www.aals.org/events/faculty-focus.

@SSRN Categorizers Can’t Recognize a Scholarly Article When They See One

I have previously lamented (here) SSRN’s arbitrary determination of “scholarly” merit. SSRN has inconsistent and unevenly applied rules for what does (and does not) qualify as a “scholarly paper.” That’s a determination with consequence: papers that don’t meet SSRN’s idiosyncratic rules are not “publicly available” and thus will not be accessible on the author’s page on SSRN. The paper is rendered invisible on the SSRN platform (although one can land on the paper through an internet search).

Brian Frye (@brianlfrye) has yet again posted a paper that SSRN inexplicably treats as non-scholarly. Illegitimacy of Plagiarism Norms has an unusual (but enticing) abstract. Click through to the paper and it is… well, a traditional scholarly paper. What gives, SSRN?

The treatment of Professor Frye’s paper by SSRN suggests to me that SSRN classifiers are not actually clicking through to the papers submitted. Professor Frye’s paper is far from anything that SSRN considers a “non-scholarly” paper: work that is an “editorial or opinion paper;” “opinion, advocacy, or satire;” “data tables, summary book reviews, opinion, advocacy and satirical papers.”

SSRN's (arbitary) classfication of some papers as “scholarly” and others as “non-scholarly” and the attendant exclusion of "non-scholarly" papers from an author's publicly-available page do not serve SSRN’s stated mission (here) of providing “rapid worldwide distribution of research to authors and their readers and to facilitate communication among them at the lowest possible cost.” But then again, I’m biased.  SSRN has classified several of my papers (here, here and here, for example) as non-scholarly (and thus non-discoverable from my author page). I have sour grapes.

While we’re on the subject of unusual abstracts, Brian Frye’s new co-authored piece with Maybell Romero (Northern Illinois), The Right to Unmarry: A Proposal, has my all-time favorite abstract. No spoilers. Click through to read a beautiful, happy, joyful abstract to an undoubtedly scholarly paper. SSRN, do the right thing.

Thinking About Submitting to a Law Review's Online Companion?

Here's the info you need to know, in one handy table -- well, for 50 schools at least.

 

Updated Guide to Submitting Essays, Commentaries, Reviews to Online Law Review Companions

I've updated my guide to submitting to online law review companions at 50 law schools. It is here on SSRN. 

As before, the document contains information about word count limitations, subject matter preferences, submission details and other guidelines authors may find relevant when considering sending their work to law review presences online. There's a column indicating whether the online companion articles are included in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

Details vary widely from journal to journal. Not all journals accept unsolicited contributions. Corrections, additions, refinements to this chart are very welcome.

I've updated my guide to submitting to online law review companions at 50 law schools. It is here on SSRN. 

As before, the document contains information about word count limitations, subject matter preferences, submission details and other guidelines authors may find relevant when considering sending their work to law review presences online. There's a column indicating whether the online companion articles are included in the HeinOnline Law Journal Library.

Details vary widely from journal to journal. Not all journals accept unsolicited contributions. Corrections, additions, refinements to this chart are very welcome.

Updated Guide to Specialty Law Review Submissions - Women, Gender & Law

It's available here.

Updated Guide to Submitting Essays, Commentaries, Reviews to Online Law Review Companions

I've updated my guide to submitting to online companions to include 50 schools' law reviews.  The new guide is here on SSRN.  The chart with contains details on the mechanics of submitting essays, commentaries, reviews to the online presence of journals at 50+ schools.

For now, the document contains information about word count limitations, subject matter preferences, submission details and other guidelines authors may find relevant when considering sending their work to law review presences online.

Details vary widely from journal to journal. Not all journals accept unsolicited contributions.

Corrections, additions, refinements to this chart are very welcome. (If for any reason the link doesn't work because the submission hasn't been reviewed yet by SSRN, you can navigate to it via my SSRN page here.)

More (Specialty) Law Review Submission Guides

Raizel Liebler, Head of Faculty Scholarship Initiatives at the Louis L. Biro Library at The John Marshall Law School (Chicago), has posted to SSRN two new guides for specialty law review submissions:

• Information for Submitting to Intellectual Property and Science & Technology Law Journals; and
• Information for Submitting to the Top Specialty Law Journals

Each guide contains:

• Name of the journal (either the top 40 specialty journals in intellectual property and technology, based on the most recent Washington & Lee journal rankings, or the top 50 U.S. based student edited specialty law journals, based on the most recent Washington & Lee journal rankings). 
• Washington & Lee specialty ranking (for IP guide) or specialty ranking (for top 50 specialty student-edited U.S. law journals)
• Submission via Expresso, Scholastica, or email
• Whether articles from online journal are included in HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library
• Specific information about submission, such as word count limitation, if any.

Helpful!

 

@SSRN and the (Arbitrary) Determination of "Scholarly" Merit

Yesterday Brian Frye (@brianlfrye) (Kentucky) tweeted:

I am sad. @SSRN has decided that my article about Gremlins (1984), "In re Patentability of the Peltzer Inventions," does not qualify for "public" status because it is "opinion, advocacy, or satire." Why judge? Oh well.  You can still download it here: http://www.ssrn.com/abstrac_id=3371989.

I followed Brian's direct link to the piece. The abstract refers refers to the many inventions of the movie's Randall Peltzer character, and explains, "This essay takes the form of an opinion letter valuating the patentability of Peltizer's inventions." I don't teach IP, but I like Brian's work and so I downloaded the essay. It struck me as funny and as an excellent teaching tool.  But if you go to Brian's author page on SSRN, you wouldn't be able to access the paper.  You wouldn't even see it.

I myself have posted material that apparently doesn't meet SSRN's criteria for a "scholarly paper," including this interview with the principal drafter of some important state trust legislation (and the interview itself has been cited in subsequent scholarship) and this short piece for Tax Notes reviewing estate and gift tax law review articles published in 2016 (even though SSRN published my similar pieces reviewing scholarship for the years 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010).

When I posted my Information for Submitting to Online Law Review Companions (a submission guide modeled after Nancy Levit and Allen Rostron's useful Law Review Submission Guide), SSRN reviewer "TyD" responded:

We have accepted your paper to appear in the "Other Papers" section of your Author Page, which is where opinion, advocacy and satirical papers are displayed as per SSRN policy. It will not be searchable by the SSRN eLibrary search engine but will be searchable by public search engines, and you may share the URL.

I asked SSRN for reconsideration, and got this from SSRN reviewer "Katie M":

We have recently reviewed your submission to SSRN. Our classifiers have determined that this submission is very useful information, however would still be considered non-scholarly. Because of our acceptance of your previous paper 1019029 [the Levit/Rostron paper, which isn't "my" paper -- BC], we have made the decision to allow the public viewing of this paper. In the future, similar submissions will be processed to appear in the "Other Papers" section of your Author Page, which is where submissions that are not full scholarly research papers (including submissions such as data tables, summary book reviews, opinion, advocacy and satirical papers) are displayed as per SSRN policy.

I don't even bother thinking that Information for Submitting to Specialty Law Reviews and Journals in Gender, Women & Sexuality will be a searchable public paper. 

So what exactly are SSRN's rules for what is "publicly available" and what is not? What I could find appears below the fold.

CFP: Critical Legal Academics and Scholars International Collaborative Virtual Workshops

Cyra Akila Choudhury (FIU) is coordinating a series of virtual research and writing workshops called CLASIC, the Critical Legal Academics and Scholars International Collaborative.

The workshops will be virtual meetings of collaborative members and can be open to all or by invitation only. It provides a virtual space in which papers, ideas, book proposals, etc., can be workshoped for feedback. The format follows Harvard’s Institute for Global Law and Policy writing workshops.

In addition to workshoping papers, scholars will have the opportunity to collaborate, connect, disseminate work and increase readership/audience for critical legal work that otherwise may be overlooked.

The first workshop will take place on Tuesday, April 23.  More info available here. Anyone interested in participating should email Professor Choudhury: cyra.choudhury (at) fiu.edu.

UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy Exclusive Call for Submissions: Now Through July 7

From the student editors at UC Davis:

The UC Davis Journal of Juvenile Law & Policy (“JJLP”) is now accepting exclusive submissions for its Winter Issue of Volume 23. JJLP is a biannual publication of the UC Davis School of Law that addresses the unique concerns of youth in the American legal system. All articles submitted to JJLP between now and July 7 , 2018, at 11:59 PM Pacific Time, will be evaluated and considered for publication by July 28 , 2018. To be considered, an article must relate to some aspect of juvenile law or policy, such as juvenile health and mental health, education, or the juvenile justice system. If you have previously submitted an article to JJLP, you must resubmit the article for consideration in this review.

By submitting an article via this exclusive submission track, the author agrees to accept an offer of publication, should one be extended. Articles that receive offers of publication will be published in the Winter Issue of Volume 23. The publication process involves an interactive editing process between the author and the staff of JJLP.

To submit, please email your article manuscript in Microsoft Word format, along with your CV, to jjlp.ucdavis@gmail.com. Please title the subject line “Winter 2019 Exclusive Submission Track.”

For Men in the Legal Academy Who Want to Help Fight Sexism

Men in the legal academy, if you want to help fight sexism...

...do cite good scholarship by women. Empirically survey your own footnotes before sending in that manuscript....don't accept invites to speak on panels without racial and gender balance. Ask the question before accepting....do call out other men who speak over women in faculty meetings.

...do ask each law review that offers to publish your article about the racial and gender balance of the authors the journal has published in the last five years.

...do advocate for key committee leadership by women of all colors, men of all colors and other minority groups. Faculty hiring might look a wee bit different.

...do look at racial and gender salary disparities on your own faculty, if the information is publicly available. Ask questions. In. Front. Of. Everyone.

...don't close your office door fully when meeting with any students, especially women.  In confidential situations, draw the door partially closed and speak quietly.

...don't date students.  If you respect women, men, and yourself, you can wait until after graduation.

...don't call on a female student to give the "woman's perspective;" don't call on a student of color to give the "black/brown/Asian/other" perspective.  No one speaks for an entire group. No one student should carry the burden of educating the rest of the class. You're the teacher.

...don't wait for a student to raise issues of gender, race, class, sexuality.  Lead by example and signal that these issues can be important.

...when teaching Crim Law, do remember that there are rape survivors in your classroom. They are not snowflakes; they are strong; but be considerate.

...don't comment on any student's appearance. If the student needs some friendly advice about what is or is not appropriate clothing for class or interviews, there's a Dean of Students for a reason.

...do instruct moot court judges that they are not to comment on students' appearances. If there are concerns that could hurt the student's career, rely again on the Dean of Students, not the moot court judges, to convey the info.

...don't call a mixed-gender group of staff or students "guys" (e.g., don't say, "Have the guys in the IT department check your computer," when there are women who work in the IT department, too.)

...do object to the use of the word "guys" to refer to a mixed-gender group of students, colleagues, staff (e.g., "Those guys did a great job"). Your vocal objection to the use of "guys" in a case like this would be a rare instance in which "mansplaining" is welcome, especially to other men. Don't make it women's work to be the ones who remind everyone else of the importance of gender-neutral language. Your school may even have a policy on it.

 

(cross-post from FeministLawProfs.com, here)

Introducing the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum & Call for Proposals

From the mailbox:

In the spirit of academic engagement and mentoring in the area of Equality Law, we (Tristin Green, University of San Francisco; Angela Onwuachi-Willig, UC Berkeley; and Leticia Saucedo, UC Davis) introduce the Equality Law Scholars’ Forum to be held this Fall.  This Scholars’ Forum seeks to provide junior scholars with commentary and critique and to provide scholars at all career stages the opportunity to engage with new scholarly currents and ideas.  We hope to bring together scholars with varied perspectives (e.g., critical race theory, class critical theory, feminist legal theory, law and economics, law and society) across fields (e.g., criminal system, education, employment, family, health, immigration, property, tax) and with work relevant to many diverse identities (e.g., age, class, disability, national origin, race, sex, sexuality) to build bridges and to generate new ideas in the area of Equality Law.  

We will select three to four relatively junior scholars (untenured, newly tenured, or prospective professors) to present papers from proposals submitted in response to this Call for Proposals. In so doing, we will select papers that cover a broad range of topics within the area of Equality Law.  Leading senior scholars will provide commentary on each of the featured papers in an intimate and collegial setting.  The Equality Law Scholars’ Forum will pay transportation and accommodation expenses for participants and will host a dinner on Friday evening.  

This year’s Forum will be held on November 17, 2017 at Berkeley Law School.

Junior scholars are invited to submit abstracts of proposed papers, 3-5 pages in length, by July 14, 2017.

Full drafts must be available for circulation to participants by October 27, 2017.

Proposals should be submitted to: Tristin Green, USF School of Law, tgreen4@usfca.edu.  Electronic submissions via email are preferred.

Exclusive Submission Opportunity at Penn State Law Review

From the students at the Penn State Law Review:

The Penn State Law Review is conducting a direct article review to fill positions in Volume 121: Issue 1 and 2. Any article submitted to this review between now and May 9th will be considered and evaluated by May 13th. If you have submitted an article to the Penn State Law Review previously, you must resubmit your article for consideration in this direct review. 

By submitting your article, you agree to accept an offer for publication, should one be extended. Any articles accepted will be published in Volume 121: Issue 1 or Issue 2 of this review. Issue 1 is currently scheduled for publication in September 2016. 

If you have an article that you would like to submit, please e-mail an attached copy of the article, along with your cv and cover letter, to bta5030@psu.edu . Please include “2016 Direct Article Review” in the subject line.​

Please feel free to contact Brett Atanasio, Editor-In-Chief, with questions.

 

Empirical Research Security Concerns

Continuing with the posts I've been doing over the past two weeks about my new book, Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism, today I want to write a bit about the security concerns that my co-author and I confronted in doing this research.  Some of this is generalizable to other qualitative empirical research, but some of it is very particular to the topic we were researching.

The generalizable concerns are not terribly new, so I'll be quick with them.  The big concern we had here, which is true with most qualitative research (though not all), was in protecting the identities of our interview subjects.  We labeled all computer files associated with a particular subject with a random number, rather than names, and had only one password-protected file that linked the random numbers with individual names.  That file was on a non-networked hard-drive and backed up to a non-networked backup drive.  There were no other copies of the file, and it could not be accessed remotely.  The consent forms that individuals signed, which had their real names on them, were not in any way associated with their random number and were kept in a locked file cabinet in alphabetical order.

As I wrote in an earlier post, in writing the book, we used fake names for each subject in our book (except for the small number who insisted on real names) and used the Census Bureau region map to identify where a person worked.  We offered each person the opportunity to approve the fake name and the descriptive region, with some wanting a different name or more generalized region description (or none at all) to protect their identity.

These are all fairly standard concerns, though.  What was more interesting with our research were the concerns that came from the topic - anti-abortion harassment and terrorism.  Because of this topic, with its history of intimidation, targeting, and violence, there were extra security precautions as part of the research:

• Limitations on initial contact:  We were prohibited by our IRB from making the initial contact with any of our possible research subjects.  In other words, they had to come to us; we couldn't go to them.  Thus, even if one of our subjects told us about someone they knew who would be a valuable person to interview (a pretty standard way to get more interview subjects), we had to ask the initial person to contact their friend and ask that person to then email or call us.  This was cumbersome, but it made sense.  After all, we were studying individualized harassment, so an unwelcome phone call from a stranger could add to the sense of being harassed.  Or worse - the person we called may not know whether to trust us and may feel that this is a possible trick to get personal information from them.  We didn't want to put anyone in that position, so we strictly followed this IRB requirement even though it made subject enrollment more difficult.
• Professional conference security:  Partly due to what I just described, pretty early on we got some great advice to attend a professional meeting of abortion providers so we could have a booth advertising our research for potential interview subjects.  For the exact reasons we wrote our book, this conference was like no other professional conference that I've heard about.  The date and location are secret.  In order to find out that information, we had to get letters of reference from two people already trusted by the organizer.  In the weeks leading up to it, we received notices about confidentiality and secrecy about the conference and its location.  When we got there, bomb-sniffing dogs and large men and women wearing gray suits and earpieces were all over the conference venue.  Name tags had to be worn at all times and then taken off upon leaving the conference area.  One morning, we had to wait 15 minutes to enter the conference area because the dogs had to do an extra bomb check.  These security measures were in place so that abortion providers are kept safe.  It presents a barrier to entry for researchers, but a barrier that is necessary given the history of violence and targeting. 
• Our own personal security:  We have often gotten the question "do you fear the anti-abortion extremists will come after you?"  Relatedly, "do you need extra security for your research data in your office?"  While we can never be 100% sure, history tells us that we don't need to be concerned about this.  Anti-abortion extremists have gone after all sorts of providers -- doctors, nurses, administrators, counselors, volunteers, security guards, and more -- but they have not, so far, targeted attorneys and researchers.  This, of course, could change, but we made a decision early on not to let this concern get to us unless for some reason we had reason to believe otherwise.

There were other security-related concerns doing this work, but these were the most significant.  It's pretty safe to say that empirical research presents security concerns that traditional legal research does not.

The Fun - and Messiness - of Qualitative Empirical Research

I've always greatly enjoyed the scholarship side of being a law professor.  In fact, and I'm just one of many who's said this before, if you don't enjoy it, it's really not the right job for you.

But little did I know until I started in on the research behind my newly released book about anti-abortion terrorism that there is another form of scholarship that is much more enjoyable than your standard law professor theoretical or doctrinal scholarship - the qualitative empirical research that my last couple of posts have covered.

The key factor in most qualitative empirical research is that you are talking with people about their experiences to learn about how and why they do or experience things.  These interviews form a data set that you then analyze to raise questions or reach conclusions about the phenomenon you are studying.  It's nearly impossible to draw generalizable conclusions from qualitative research, but you can provide useful explanations and derive novel theories from it.

This is a very different method of scholarship than typical law professor scholarship.  At least as I've experienced it, theoretical and doctrinal legal scholarship is a fairly solitary enterprise.  You read cases, books, articles, legal documents, etc.; develop ideas and theories based on them; and then write up your analysis.  All of this can be done from the confines of your office (or home or coffee shop or whevever).  As I said at the start of this post, I have no doubt enjoyed this type of scholarship in the past.

But after doing this qualitative research project over the past few years, I'm not sure I'm eager to go back to traditional legal scholarship.  Why?  Because the qualitative research is simply more fun.

There are many reasons for this.  I think the main reason is that you are interacting with people who are describing their lives and how law interacts with it.  In doing so, you get yourself out of your office, see and learn about the variety of people's lives, and learn about the real world effects of law.  To me, this was energizing in a way that I never anticipated.

Beyond this, there's a thrill of creating a new data set that had never existed before.  In capturing stories and people's experiences that may have never been told before, you are producing raw data for the world that's new.  From that, you develop your own analysis, but others may be able to use this data for other analyses.  That's a contribution to the world that's different than ordinary research.

Then there's also the connections that you get from doing this kind of research.  You build a network of people who trust you and might help you with other projects, whether scholarly or otherwise.

All of this, and other aspects of it as well, has been hugely rewarding and fun for me.  It doesn't come without its messiness though.  And the messiness comes from what makes it so rewarding and fun in the first place - dealing with people.

When you deal with people, you have to track them down, keep track of them, work around their schedules, and handle their idiosyncrasies.  Caselaw and law review articles don't change contact information mid-stream, fail to return your calls, or demand that you do things one way or they won't participate.  Compiling your sources for typical legal scholarship doesn't turn you into a detective trying to locate subjects who are sometimes moving targets.  In other words, all the things that are messy about dealing with people in real life are also messy in dealing with people for research purposes.

Which makes qualitative research not the right thing for every law professor.  Far from it.  However, for me, after having so much fun with this methodology, even with the messiness, I really do find it hard to imagine going back.