By Dan Markel, Ethan Leib, Rick Garnett, Matt Bodie, Paul Horwitz , Steve Vladeck, and Orly Lobel
Sparked by a form he must fill out for research purposes, Eric asks sound questions about a common subject: research agendas. As one of his commenters suggests, Eric may be reading too much significance into the question; it may just be a symptom of creeping form-itis. But these issues are always worth raising.
I have written a fairly eclectic range of scholarship. That having been said, I find more and more that my work tends to group itself into two or three general "agenda" topics. They may be fairly broad or fairly narrow. Each one tends to give rise to several projects. And, of course, a topic may drop out, or play out, over time and be replaced by a new topic. Even so, within these groupings there's more than enough room for eclecticism.
Is that too constraining, even so? Perhaps, but like many or most such constraints, it's a valuable constraint. I don't need to channel Jed Rubenfeld to agree that we tend to live out our commitments over time, and that these commitments are enriched by our tending to stick with them. For the scholar, one thing they bring is efficiency; every junior scholar discovers at some point that it can be tiring to reinvent the wheel with every piece, and certainly it's nice, the more you know about a subject, that you spend less time on basics and throat-clearing, both in terms of research and in terms of writing (those bloated Parts One or Two of law review essays that we're all familiar with, which might as well be titled "Experienced Scholars May Skip This Section," but which we need to write at first in order to familiarize ourselves with the subject). These commitments also bring synergy and depth to one's work. One may even hope over time that they will bring wisdom. And, like other such constraints, from marriage to constitutionalism, the constraint of a scholarly commitment to a particular general topic can bring contentment and a sense of meaningful growth within a somewhat bounded area.
None of that is to gainsay the joys of having a broadly eclectic set of interests. Consider Posner! But even he tends to develop a new interest over a series of articles or books, and this obviously has not unduly limited him in the subjects within his reach.
I provided a research agenda to schools when I went on the market. I don't know whether it impressed them or not, although I like to see them from job candidates, in part because I know that such a scholar is going to be self-starting and will generate ideas and pieces for some time. A good agenda also convinces me that the candidate isn't just engaging in law practice part two; that is, although a candidate may be working through problems that interested him or her in practice, a meaningful and (somewhat) unified agenda suggests that the work won't run out once that person's recollections of practice run out. And I advise junior scholars and job candidates to have such an agenda. I tell them that they needn't stick to it. It's not the Bible. But even the act of writing out such an agenda, whether at the job market stage or (maybe especially!) mid-career, helps to flesh out one's ideas and give a sense of projects that will demand the best of one's scholarly spirit over a period of years.
Finally, I tell people who are developing an agenda that there is not one approach to doing so. Agendas can be shaped in various ways. One might develop a research agenda in a subject area; one might develop a theory, which needs both fleshing out and a series of applications, in one field or several; or one might be interested in a particular method (say, empirical work), and then use that method as a tool and apply it to a variety of questions or subjects. (Cf. Ian Ayres.) All of these are acceptable ways of forming an agenda, and all of them give rise to different forms of potential eclecticism, whether it's using various methods to examine problems in contract law or using one method to examine various fields of private law.
Whatever approach you take, I think there is much value in the scholarly life in making and following through on intellectual commitments. And I find that it's true what they say; as I hit mid-career, or at least as I reach the end of the beginning of my scholarly career, I find that I now am much more intellectually fertile than I was, and more capable of sustaining and completing multiple projects, because of both the work that has come before and the fact that this work has been grouped, however loosely, into particular sets of commitments. Of course, agendas are always ripe for reassessment; as I said, I think mid-career scholars ought to make this a part of their career plan, and leaves and sabbatical years may be an especially good time to do so. But I think that my current scholarly life is all the richer for being forged out of particular temporally extended commitments.
