Farewell Post II: Still Crazy About Blogging after All These Years

I’m not stopping because I’m burned out.  I still love blogging, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, after a hiatus, I want to come back to blogging in some form.  I’m stopping because I think I’ve maxed out on the benefits I can derive for myself and my law school from this enterprise, and it is time for me to find new ways to contribute.  Also, look how blogging has aged me, as evidenced in these photographs of me taken before I started blogging (left) and after (right).

Moving on feels especially urgent given what is going on in the legal academy and in unranked law schools like mine in particular.  Posts III and IV in this series will elaborate on that subject.  Given the challenges that my current students face and that I face in teaching them, I am contemplating a complete re-tooling of my approach to teaching contracts.  I have requested a year off from teaching contracts next year so that I can teach a couple of legal writing/legal reasoning courses and get better insights into where my students are at in those areas when they get to law school.  I also need to learn from my skills-training colleagues so that I can better incorporate skills training into doctrinal teaching when I go back to teaching contracts, as I very much hope to do.  

At the same time, at age 52, I am beginning to think about what remains of my career as an academic and what sort of an impact I think I can have in the 10-15 years that remain to me as an active scholar and teacher.  It is already clear to me that my most important impact is going to be in the classroom.  Although I would like to think that I have original ideas and can contribute to an academic debate that can move the law or inform policy decisions, the likelihood of that is small, as it is for most of us mortals.  Still, perhaps out of vanity, I have three book projects that I think will keep me occupied into my sixties.  One is an edited collection on Hans Kelsen, which is under contract and which I hope will come out next year.  The second is an intellectual history of originalism in constitutional adjudication, as a judicial practice, an academic approach and a popular movement.  The third will be on theories of public international law,  I have a typology of public international law theories that I use in presenting the material to my students.  I’ve always wished there were a book that did this the way it needs to be done. Oona Hathaway and Harold Koh edit a collection which is very useful, but for some reason they have not decided to organize the material the way I organize it.  I’m kidding.  My organization is unique, and I will only know if it makes sense once the book is well underway.  So, I have assigned myself the task of writing that book.

None of these projects relates to contracts law, and so the prospects for me returning to contracts scholarship before retirement are remote.  I expect that I will continue to follow the blog, use it as a resource, refer students to it, and feel pride that I contributed to it for nearly a decade.  But I need to allocate my dwindling intellectual energies elsewhere.  Producing a book every five years is something I think I can still handle while focusing on Job 1, which is helping my students pass the bar and prepare for their legal careers.