Thread by @TaraVanHo

I've been decisively described as a "scholaractivist" more than 1x. Perhaps unsurprisingly, but I take it as a point of pride that my research has impact beyond its "merely discursive" contribution.

A brief 🧵 in which @tarunkhaitan's & my differences seem bigger than they are.

https://twitter.com/tarunkhaitan/status/1556640881972858882

First, let's admit that in today's UKHE, it is a privilege to focus on "merely discursive" contributions yo the law. The UK Research Excellence Framework & grant-making bodies prioritise the kind of impact @tarunkhaitan dismisses as activism.

Society has demanded that our work move beyond seeking truth & disseminating knowledge. We are increasingly required to show that our work has some larger purpose & role. The choice to reject that demand is a choice of a particular kind of privilege.

And while not universally true, that particular kind of privilege is generally enjoyed exclusively by people who enjoyed other forms of privilege (class, race, gender).

Next, I do not believe there is a universal "role morality" for scholars.

Instead, our role morality is contingent on other factors: what is happening around us, our area of expertise & its purpose, our external privileges, etc.

This is because thinking & disseminating are activities that do not exist within a vacuum. They are contextual activities.

For as much as I joke about jurisprudence, it is a significant & important area of legal inquiry. But it is fundamentally different in terms of its *purpose* is different than, say, Business & Human Rights where stakeholders rely on analytical input to design policies

& processes. I would be doing a disservice if the direction of my work was not responsive to the needs of stakeholders. We, as a field, would become irrelevant quickly -- not just in practice but in theory. Because when left to our thinking & dissemination, our theory can become

impractical & pointless. Now, there are times when we should remain resolutely impractical. I advocate for the abolition of ISDS because I-- as objectively as I can be--think it is the necessary & theoretically outcome, even though I doubt states will go this far.b

But when it comes to other questions -- ie, the difference between cause, contribute & directly linked -- theoretically interesting & sound but fundamentally impractical analysis can mean academic knowledge no longer *can be* truth & its dissemination irrelevant & harmful.

As @tarunkhaitan recognizes, "[t]ruth concerns reality itself." When we remove ourselves from reality for discursive purity, we remove truth from our inquiries. In doing so, we undermine both the purpose of our inquiry & its likely dissemination.

This leads to my bigger disagreement with @tarunkhaitan: he posits a binary that places the pursuit of material outcomes in opposition to truthfulness & discursive accuracy.

See for example this quote:

"I will conclude by suggesting that while the pre-research choice of the topic of inquiry and post-publication public engagement and dissemination are permitted to the activists inside us, the pursuit of specific material impact through our scholarship is not."

I don't know of any scholar-actividt who actually starts with a singular material *outcome,* which is, IMO, different than a material *impact*, but what @tarunkhaitan seems to equate with impact.

A material impact is something like "Develop criteria on corporate respect for human rights defenders" or "articulate a constitutional law bases for trans rights" or, as I did recently,"identify how racism continues to manifest in investment law scholarship so as to inform

better scholarly practices." These are both the objectives & material impacts of research. They are not, however, determinative of the outcome other than. They set the parameters of inquiry. The outcome will be more specific and the potential range of outcomes for any of these

objectives/impacts is vast.

Within the range of possibilities, there will rarely be one *truth.* there will be a range of truths and the scholars role is to identify the "best" of these options of truth. What is the best? How does one determine it?

Those questions do not have singular answers. And not just because there are different forms of knowing -- empirical, moral, conceptual, etc., as @tarunkhaitan recognises -- but because there is not a singular truth even for one person.

Perhaps I am wrong or perhaps

.@tarunkhaitan is simply more fortunate than I, but I have never found a singular, truthfully "best" answer in all my time as an academic. I have best-answers-for-now-and-for-what-I-understand-to-date. As I said the other day, I will often (read: always?) dislike my public'ns

within a month of their release not because they are inherently bad or unworthy but because more knowledge & insight will have come to life; because someone else will have published something I wish I could include or because someone will refute my assertion in a way I like or

find persuasive or, at the very least, wish I could respond to in order to show how absolutely wrong they are and how absolutely, brilliantly right I am.

As such, my outcomes are rarely determined in advance even as my impact is.

There is a rare exception, howver:

Sometimes, I start a paper having already worked out the end, not because I've chosen to be a scholar activist but because I have thought about the issue for *years* before I ever get the chance to write on it.

Take, for example, my argument that businesses need to divest from Israel because of the illegitimate crackdown on leading Palestinian NGOs. To date, I've only published this belief on @opiniojuris:

opiniojuris.org/2021/11/02/the…

.@AnneHerzberg14 published a rebuttal which seriously misconstrues my argument & which I will -- someday, when I have time -- respond to through a full-length article.

(As I said, she deeply misrepresents my arg but for fairness you can read her here:

opiniojuris.org/2021/11/25/mis…

But neither my post nor the eventual article were the result of pre-determined outcomes. They were/will be the result of over a decade of thinking about what's required for businesses to respect human rights in conflict-affected areas.

I have an answer to that because for 15-20 yrs I've accumulated the relevant knowledge & thoughtfulness to reach what I believe is the best answer, the closest to truth we have. So I know the outcome of this subsequent article not because I pre-determined it in the way

that I think @tarunkhaitan means but because I have sat with this issue for a long time.

Now, this is where my disagreement with @tarunkhaitan is perhaps sharpest: the truth is, if the result of that "sitting with" the issue was something I found morally repugnant -- if for ex

sitting with the Q had led me to determine an independent NGO community was unnecessary to #BizHumanRights #DueDiligence --I might not ever write that article. Why? Because my goodness, I *believe* in the importance of this piece & it is still # 4-5 on my list of pieces to write!

Because when you are a "scholaractivist" -- as people would like to dismiss me -- you are so fundamentally connected to the reality of your field that there are (approximately, perhaps exaggeratedly) 600-1000 things you need to write because the field demands it so if you

have something that doesn't excite you, why TF would you waste your time on it? So, in the selection of where I spend my time, sometimes I make that choice with the knowledge of the outcome because that outcome is motivating & important.

When I finally write that article, it will be because I cannot push it off any longer -- because I know its significance academically & practically. Because, again, the academic & practical are not & cannot be far apart in my field.

But, if I read @tarunkhaitan correctly--

and while I believe I do, I am open to correction--he would condemn the nature of that choice because it is outcome (& impact) driven rather than something else.

Now, it's possible @tarunkhaitan & I disagree primarily because our experience of scholaractivism is so different.

In his propositions, he posits an example of a scholaractivist contacted by an NGO who wants a particular argument advanced. The academic writes the article as the NGO asks but its outcome aligns with the scholars knowledge so the scholar is writing what they know to be true.

Still, he asserts, "her actions, motivated by a specific practical outcome, are dangerous for her role as a scholar and for the academy more broadly."

I've been asked by NGOs for analysis, and I've served as a consultant for NGOs, and yet I've never had the descruved experience.

Because when NGOs approach me -- and perhaps I'm privileged here but I can't imagine so --it is with a sincere question:

- what is a business's responsibility in X?
- what options of accountability are there for Y?
-what is your analysis of the EU Directive? What does it miss?

I'm not asked to write an argument. I'm asked to analyse a problem. And I cannot see how we reduce our moral role when we answer the practical needs our fields are wrestling with. Yet, @tarunkhaitan seems to suggest there is:

"activism is practical: it usually requires quick responses to concrete problems in particular places.... Scholarship’s theoretical goals, on the other hand, demand time for reading, thinking, discussing, workshopping, getting peer reviewed, revising, and so on."

Here, @tarunkhaitan seems to confuse what it is scholaractivists do (or at least what I do when I'm accused of scholaractivism...): when I am asked to address a concrete problem, I draw on my years of knowledge to write practical guidance. That is fundamentally different than

what I do when I write an academic article. Sometimes, the consultation comes first and sometimes the article does, but in both cases there is a firm division between my consultative work & my scholarly writing. One is narrow, focused on a problem & the other is broad, focused on

theory. They always complement each other & I have done the scholarly theoretical work to answer the practical need, but it is never the case that my answer to the practical need drives my theoretical focus. I think by failing to recognise that -- by condensing the 2

parts of the process, @tarunkhaitan makes a strawman of the work: it's easy to dismiss an article written from induction, even if true; it's harder to critique the person who delivers 2 distinct works for the public, each with its own focus & purpose.

But this goes back to my fundamental and practical disagreement with @tarunkhaitan on the moral role of the scholar: we do not have a singular role, in my opinion. It is contextual, and one of those contexts is timing. Sometimes, we might make quick work of a piece because it is

the product of decades of knowledge accumulation. Sometimes, we might stew on an issue for a decade before we ever write on it. In both instances, the scholar is fulfilling one of the moral roles of the scholar.

Now I've written 2 extensive threads on my phone because I couldn't wait to read @tarunkhaitan's piece --or respond to it once I read it -- until I got back to my hotel, so please excuse the 600000 typos the threads inevitably have.

This was supposed to say *inducement.