Thanks to @lawprofblawg for lending me the reins while the blog master deals with some personal matters.
I noticed a few recent items recently on the Twitter Machine (including from posts by @daniellecitron and @sweberwaller) discussing coauthoring. I wanted to add my own two cents on this topic that is near and dear to my heart.
Law teaching is by and large a solitary endeavor. One of the nicer things about being involved in administration is working collaboratively with the senior staff who are some of the hardest working, most talented, and least appreciated folks at most law schools.
But for the other aspects of faculty life, it is mostly about teaching and writing. Teaching obviously involves student contact in the classroom and those few brave souls who actually come to office hours prior to the week before the final. But most of class prep and grading of exercises, midterms, and finals involve long, solitary hours.
So too, the scholarship end of things. Ideas percolate up from the great abyss, judicial decisions, legislation, prior articles, conferences, and things in the real world that just piss you off. Then you read, write, revise, share your manuscripts with a handful of friends or colleagues, read their comments, read some more, revise some, and then maybe present at a workshop or two. By now, you’re ready to submit yourself for the great crap shoot of Scholastica and the five stages of publication: self-praise, self-loathing, denial, anger, and then acceptance (hopefully in both senses of the word).
Coauthoring is one of the ways to make the process of writing more collaborative, less solitary, less anxious, and more satisfying. Over the years, I have coauthored books, book chapters, articles, and even blog posts (thanks @lawprofblawg). I have coauthored with colleagues at my school, profs at other law schools, friends from high school, folks from other disciplines, current students, former students, and was once partnered by a peer review journal with a then total stranger (now a valued professional acquaintance) to do a joint book review.
I have never once been sorry I worked with a coauthor, although there were obviously frustrating moments along the way when our visions or writing styles didn’t exactly match our chosen topic or project. Maybe once the two of us decided to go our separate ways. Otherwise my coauthors and I always found some way of expressing what we were after, without resorting to stating in print that Professor X thinks such and such and Professor Y thinks his coauthor is a moron.
The vast majority of the time each of us contributed about 50 percent to a true joint endeavor. We normally hash out an outline and one of us writes a draft of a section and sends to the coauthor for their take, edits, and additional new material. And back and forth the draft goes with numerous conversations which can solve conundrums and queries far more quickly than an endless exchange of comments in the margin. The back and forth generally continues with plenty of phone calls until we complete enough drafts to permit posting or submission of the piece.
From time to time, I can recall projects where we each had primary responsibility for different sections based on differing expertise. But I can only recall one occasion where I was the real author of about half of the article and my coauthor more or less wrote the other half, and we at most functioned as editors of each other’s prose to create a more consistent voice.
In between sending and receiving the draft, I am usually working on other projects and the usual teaching and whatever administrative matters I have been unable to shed since descending from the dean’s suite.
For me, the best part is the product rather than the process. The piece is already battle tested long before it is ever seen by any third parties. I have convinced myself and a knowledgeable coauthor that we are onto something good. We usually have only partially overlapping circles of friends and trusted manuscript readers so we benefit from a wider and more diverse field of comments and suggestions. We usually have twice the opportunities to workshop the piece externally and internally.
One of us is even likely to have a fancier résumé or letterhead for submission purposes if you go for that sort of thing. I have so far rejected the notion of simply listing Cass Sunstein or Mark Lemley as a coauthor for all of my work. In return, they have shown absolutely no interest in actually coauthoring with me.
I also get that plenty of folks like the monastic solitude of sole authorship. To the best of my knowledge, no school will ever force you to do otherwise.
The real question is how profs or job candidates who want to coauthor deal with hiring, promotion, and tenure committees who may not value coauthorship the same way I do. One way to approach this issue involved a now-distinguished prof, who as an untenured professor refused to do anything other than coauthored pieces of high quality published in good places. He then dared anyone at his school to make an issue of it. He came out fine, but I don’t recommend this particular strategy for everyone.
But I also reject the conventional wisdom not to coauthor until after tenure. For me, hiring, promotion, and tenure is a prediction about the likelihood of a future of productive scholarship. Why wouldn’t you hire a new prof whose work was good enough that her prof was willing to coauthor and put her name on a piece? In all likelihood, that student did most of the work anyway. Why wouldn’t you hire someone who cared about scholarship enough to coauthor something on top of working a gazillion hours at the Justice Department, a public interest practice, or law firm? Why wouldn’t you professionally reward a professor who has honed her ideas with a similarly motivated partner to produce a steady stream of high quality work? Why would you want to reward a smaller body of lesser work by a single author?
Coauthoring is simply more fun and highly likely to produce a better article which is the thing that law schools should value highly. Perhaps my coauthors will even agree with some of these assertions.
The least productive discussions I have listened to have been the occasional colleague who will only credit a coauthored piece where it can be easily ascertained which part the candidate had sole or primary authorship. I think they are missing the point and the fun of coauthorship. Most cautious candidates simply submit a mix of sole and coauthored pieces of high quality and the question is moot. But if you run ever run into a roadblock with a coauthored piece, LawProfBlawg and TempDean will do the scholarship review for you. Whether your school accepts anonymous coauthored scholarship reviews is another question.
TempDean is an anonymous professor and former interim administrator at a top 100 law school. Email him c/o lawprofblawg@gmail.com if you must.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here. He is way funnier on social media, he claims. Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.
The Joys Of Coauthoring curated from Above the Law
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