Greetings! I’d like to thank the folks here at Prawfsblawg for the invitation to guest blog here for the next couple weeks.
For my first post, I thought I’d enlist the help of the prawfsblawg readership — As Chair of the AALS Section on Scholarship, I am in charge of organizing the section’s panel for the AALS annual mtg in D.C. this January. Our program — “Crafting a Scholarly Persona” — is intended to be a loose take-off of Bravo’s Inside the Actor’s Studio. During the program, I will ask three established scholars about their individual career paths. –How they chose their article topics, what the goals of their scholarship are, how they view their research agendas, etc. I am thrilled that Ian Ayres, Paul Robinson, and Carol Sanger have agreed to participate. Now, the question is what to ask them??? I have some ideas, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Posted by Kim Ferzan on July 5, 2006 at 01:08 PM
Comments
How about asking about misreadings and the scholarly persona – are there patterned gaps between how they perceive their own contributions and how other people understood their projects? Is the gap part of the success of a paper — that it detaches from the persona and receives a life of its own?
Posted by: Orly Lobel | Jul 7, 2006 12:06:18 AM
I like Orin Kerr’s question (especially if you invite them to identify something they did that they wish they hadn’t done).
I might also suggest some probing on the pros and cons of sticking to more narrowly defined fields over time vs. more wide-ranging writing. Ayres, of course, writes on a dizzying array of different subjects; the other two are somewhat more defined (though still quite diverse). None of them is a hyper-specialist.
Posted by: William McGeveran | Jul 6, 2006 10:59:26 PM
Sounds like a great panel.
Here’s a question that might prove illuminating: If you could start your scholarly career over again, what if anything would you do differently?
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Jul 5, 2006 4:29:13 PM