After sending out an op-ed last week, I started to think a bit more about the various forms – and forums – for writing available to new law professors. While I enjoyed the feedback I got on the piece, the editing process took quite a lot longer than I anticipated and I began to wonder whether op-ed writing is worthwhile, especially during the pre-tenure years, given the availability of blogs and other more direct forms for “non-article” writing. So for example, I could have followed my colleague Haider Hamoudi (whose blog is a must read for those interested in Islamic law and other related topics) and put my own thoughts on the Oklahoma sharia ban directly into the blogosphere.
I’m curious what wisdom is out there for those of us just starting in the academy. What, if any, non-article forms of writing make the most sense in the pre-tenure years?
Posted by Michael Helfand on November 15, 2010 at 03:58 PM
Comments
Congratulations on your oped in the LATimes. That is a very selective placement and you can be certain that your oped reached hundreds of thousands of readers — many more than most blog posts (and orders of magnitude more than any law review article).
But is oped writing helpful in the pre-tenure years? If you are asking whether it will impress a tenure and promotion committee, the answer is probably not (or not much). Or are you asking whether it will actually damage one’s tenure chances. Here the answer is a little trickier. I think that a handful of opeds won’t much matter one way or the other. A lot of opeds, however, coupled with a thin record of scholarly publication, would probably be viewed as a negative — why spend so much time writing non-scholarly stuff?
In sum: I think that opeds are an important form of public expression, and that academics should participate in the broader public discourse. But you should do it for its own sake, and you should definitely stop at the point where it begins to steal time from your other writing.
One more point: It is actually harder to place an oped than it is to place a law review article. Almost every law review article eventually gets published somewhere, but many opeds never get beyond the editors’ email in-box. So congratulations again.
Posted by: Steven Lubet | Nov 15, 2010 4:56:43 PM