@HeerJeet This shld really be seen in the context of the larger absurdity of much of the legal academy in which amateurs freelance in fields they have no expertise in under the imprimatur of elite university distinction. We might call it the Law and Economics Grandiosity Problem.
@HeerJeet 2/ I shld anticipate the criticism that many law profs do important work outside narrow study of law. But those are the ones who actually seek to learn from and operate within the knowledge of other fields, even if they lack formal credentials (which are often overrated.)
@HeerJeet 3/ This problem doesn't affect all communities equally. Incidents is much higher on the right. But alas it crops up across the ideological spectrum. I was first introduced to it rather roughly. Not long after I started as an editor at The American Prospect I was assigned ...
@HeerJeet 4/ an edit by a very well known law professor at a prestigious law school. I was like a fresh recruit heading into a mine field without a helmet or any other protective gear but I didn't know that. Writing in journals like the Prospect these folks are used to being edited ...
@HeerJeet 5/ by very bright young men and women but not ones who have particular expertise in a given field. In this case it was about the history and ideological currents of the American revolutionary period and I was sitting on a mostly completely dissertation in the same general ...
@HeerJeet 6/ field. As it happens, my own area of focus was roughly 100 to 150 years earlier. But my mentor/advisor and the person I taught under was someone who specialized in exactly that period, Gordon Wood. So I needed to be pretty versed on it. Reading the piece I quickly ...
@HeerJeet 7/ noticed that the author had a series of pretty basic errors and beyond factual errors a number of interpretations that perhaps weren't narrowly 'wrong' but showed some pretty elementary errors or blind spots. My relative youth (about 30) and lack of credentials (I hadn't ...
@HeerJeet 8/ actually finished the PhD yet) wasn't lost on me. So I tried to gently note some ways we might refine the argument. Let's say it didn't go terribly well. This was one of the luminaries of the academy and in tight with the guys who ran the place and I guess he ...
@HeerJeet 9/ quickly raised the issue of my intemperance with the brass. Which led to a few uncomfortable conversations that felt at the time at least like going from 60 to 0 with the assistance of a wall. It learned an important lesson that law professors at elite institutions ...
@HeerJeet 10/ are allowed to write and publish in basically any discipline with their JD. Now as it happens, I'm pretty anti-credential on these things. The history I like to read is as often as not not written by people with formal history training. But it's good so I read it ...
@HeerJeet 11/ And to be fair to the history academy usually I'm trying to learn about new fields and often the pressures of academic publishing presses people to write monographs or studies that are narrower than what I'm looking for. So I'm really not a credentialist ...
@HeerJeet 12/ on this stuff. In fact, right now I have in my mind a law prof at an elite institution who basically works as an historian and is really at the top of the craft and her work is must reads. So I hope she doesn't think I'm talking about people like her!
@HeerJeet 13/ So my point here isn't that people need to stay in their lanes and only operate in areas where they have a formal credential. It is that it is a signature of the elite legal academy that you can publish in areas you know little about - or perhaps have written about them ...
@HeerJeet 14/ for years and developed a grand reputation within the legal academy while still knowing little about them - and feel you are entitled to be treated as knowledgable and expert. And indeed you largely are, within that world. The saving grace is that these cosplay ...
@HeerJeet 15/ areas of expertise within the legal academy function largely as bubbles that come into little contact with the folks who actually work in those fields. So it's sort of like they're playing D&D and don't really come into contact with any actual orcs or demigorgons or ...
@HeerJeet 16/ warlocks or bards. So basically it's all good and nobody gets hurt. The end.
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