Legal Commentary

I wanted to follow up on some of the later comments in Paul's excellent recent post about what prawfs ought to be doing prior to getting tenure.  David Zaring "mildly disagrees" with what he takes to be Paul's suggestion to "write your bliss" and says that a prawf who is inclined to write about his/her favorite poet's views about liberty might have more fun actually writing poetry.  Paul responds that David has misunderstood him and says "I'm not suggesting someone go off and write poetry."  All this makes me wonder: just how much poetry should a law professor be able to write?

I'm assuming nobody would say that a law professor can't throw off a few verses from time to time, but what if prawf wanted to make a serious commitment to becoming a poet, in addition to being a law professor?  The prawf wants to spend a good amount of time perfecting his/her craft, submitting to poetry journals, participating in poetry workshops, etc.  Since being a prawf and writing legal scholarship isn't a typical 9-5 job, and since most of us could always work a little harder to write yet another law review article if we wanted to sacrifice other things, would this commitment to writing poetry be a problem?  Say that for every 5 poems the prawf writes, he/she could have written one 40 page law review article.  Does writing the 5 poems make him/her a worse prawf?  Is he/she letting his/her school/colleagues/students/dean down?  Does it matter whether, if in addition to the 5 poems, the prawf also writes 2 law review articles?  1 law review article?  1 article every 2 years?  Never writes a law review article?  Does it matter whether the prawf is pre- or post-tenure?  And is there a difference between writing poetry and pursuing other non-writing hobbies, like painting or kayaking?  It doesn't seem like it should matter, but somehow the fact that poetry involves writing makes it maybe more problematic than kayaking, if indeed our job demands that if we are writing, we should be writing about law.