Using scholarship to make a difference

I’ve been spending large chunks of recent weekends working away on a law review article about therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ), the school of legal thought that examines the therapeutic and anti-therapeutic properties of laws, legal systems, and legal institutions. In this article I’m trying to pull together many aspects of TJ as a field of study, scholarship, and practice. As steady readers of this blog may know, I’ve been deeply involved in the TJ community for many years. TJ’s emphasis on the psychological impact of the law and the importance of human dignity has strongly shaped my own thinking and scholarship.

When I first became a law professor, I was skeptical about the potential of legal scholarship to influence law reform. My intention was to do scholarship in sufficient volume and quality to earn tenure, and then to pursue writing and activist projects that didn’t involve lots of citations and footnotes.

But my final law review article before going up for tenure was my first piece about the legal implications of workplace bullying, “The Phenomenon of ‘Workplace Bullying’ and the Need for Status-Blind Hostile Work Environment Protection,” published by the Georgetown Law Journal in 2000. (Go here for free pdf.) The response to that article helped to persuade me that scholarship can make a difference in the real world. And so I continue to go at it.

In the meantime, I’ve also written two law review articles that dig into the practice of legal scholarship and how it can be used to engage in law and policy reform activities.

The first article is “Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Practice of Legal Scholarship,” published by the University of Memphis Law Review in 2010. (Go here for free pdf.) Here’s the abstract describing it:

The culture of legal scholarship has become preoccupied with article placement, citations, and download numbers, thus obscuring a deeper appreciation for the contributions of scholarly work. This article proposes that therapeutic jurisprudence (“TJ”), a theoretical framework that examines the therapeutic and anti-therapeutic properties of the law and legal practice, provides us with tools for understanding and changing that culture.

More prescriptively, the article applies a TJ lens to: (1) identify a set of good practices for legal scholarship; (2) examine the TJ movement as an example of healthy scholarly practice; (3) consider the role of law professors as intellectual activists; and, (4) propose that law schools nurture a scholar-practitioner orientation in their students to help them become more engaged members of the legal profession.

As law review articles go, it’s a fairly brisk piece that covers a lot of ground about the culture of scholarship in American legal education and proposes ways to make the practice of legal scholarship more genuine and attentive to addressing challenges of law and policy.

The second article is “Intellectual Activism and the Practice of Public Interest Law,” published by the Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice in 2016. (Go here to freely download a pdf of the article.) Here’s the abstract describing it:

Intellectual activism is both a philosophy and a practice for engaging in scholarship relevant to real-world problems and challenges, putting its prescriptions into action, and learning from the process and results of implementation. In the legal context, intellectual activism involves conducting and publishing original research and analysis and then applying that work to the tasks of reforming and improving the law, legal systems, and the legal profession. This article explores the concept and practice of intellectual activism for the benefit of interested law professors, lawyers, and law students.

This is a very personal piece, grounded in extensive scholarly, public education, and advocacy work that I have done in two areas: (1) fostering the enactment of workplace anti-bullying legislation and building public awareness of the phenomenon of bullying at work; and (2) participating in an emerging legal and social movement to challenge the widespread, exploitative practice of unpaid internships. It also discusses my involvement in multidisciplinary networks and institutions that have nurtured my work, examines the relevant use of social media, and provides examples of how law students can function as intellectual activists. This article closes with an Appendix containing a short annotated bibliography of books that are broadly relevant to the topics discussed in the text.

This is a somewhat longer piece, as it goes into considerable detail about how legal scholarship can be harnessed to engage in law reform activities. I discuss my scholarly and advocacy work concerning workplace bullying and unpaid internships as illustrations of intellectual activism. For those seeking guidance and inspiration on how to translate ideas into action, this article may be useful.

In my last blog post of 2019, I suggested that we should make 2020 a year of working on solutions and responses. This world is a very fractured and divisive place right now, and a lot of people are hurting as a result. For me, writing — of both the scholarly and popular varieties — is a way of answering my own call to action. It is a modest but hopefully meaningful path toward lighting candles amidst the darkness.