Academic

Stanford Yale Junior Faculty Forum

By Gordon Smith, Christine, Hurt, Vic Fleischer, Fred Tung, Lisa Fairfax, David Zaring

My blogging's been a bit light lately because I was scrambling to get our paper ready for this year's Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum.  For the uninitiated, this event alternates between the 2 schools and between private and public law--meaning, among other things, that private law scholars always get the benefit of Stanford's beautiful campus and clime. Junior scholars submit their pieces for blind review, and the selected authors present their works to the other juniors and their commentators.  You get the benefit of comments from a senior scholar in your field and lively audience remarks.  Here's our schedule: as you can see, we were a learned (not to mention well-fed) bunch.

I unsuccessfully submitted to the forum 2 years ago, so I was thrilled to be chosen this time.  I always kind of wondered what the Forum would be like, so I thought I'd list some random observations.

1. It's scary.  My commenter was Ian Ayres, Yale Law School professor, best-selling author, whose work regularly appears in Slate and Forbes.  No pressure.

2. It's supportive and collaborative.  I received extremely sophisticated comments both from Ian and from the audience, all clearly made from the perspective of trying to make our work better.  It was a rare experience to have so many smart people focused on my work, and I loved it.

3.  It offers unscientific evidence that even if blogging isn't scholarship (yes, Kate was there!), the two can go hand in hand, even for juniors. In terms of regular bloggers,  Adam Levitin blogs at creditslips, Gaia Bernstein at Law and Technology Theory.  Anna Gelpern, David Fagundes and David Schleicherhave all guestblogged, Anna right here at the Glom.

4. You can't win if you don't play.  The deadline this year was February 16th, and our draft was still pretty rough, and I shrank from the thought of showing it to anyone, much less erudite prawfs at Stanford and Yale.  I'm sure glad I did.

Full post as published by Conglomerate on June 01, 2009 (boomark / email).