Drawing (Gad)flies: Thoughts on the Uses (or Uselessness) of Legal Scholarship

In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given.

We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant assumptions about what ought to matter in and to the law. Second, the freedom to serve this role is a large part of what attracts people capable of doing so to academic life. If we were to insist that legal scholars think about only those things that already matter to the legal profession, we would not attract the people we most need—people willing and able to help us rethink our assumptions about what ought to matter.