May 28, 2007
The month of May is high conference season for legal academics. The advice comes fast and furious. So this year, in an attempt to retain some of the knowledge, I jotted down a few notes.
Presentation Advice
1. Get to the new stuff quickly. This is one that I still mess up. The first priority of any presentation should be showing off your novel contribution to the field. The challenge is that without some background and literature review, your audience (who typically hasn't read the paper) won't know what you're talking about. Your 20 minutes goes quickly, and it's easy to find yourself with just two minutes left and new stuff to cover. So, given the choice between leaving your audience a little fuzzy about the background/lit review and unclear about what your contribution is --- make your contribution crystal clear.
2. Trust your discussant. Most discussants aren't out to get you. Good ones will restate your thesis and clarify its contributions and well as its limitations. The best ones will even tip you off beforehand so you know what's coming.
3. Slow down. Most presenters go too fast. Slow down, emphasize the important points, pause after those points, and repeat them later on.
4. Offer multiple takeaways. Audiences vary in their level of sophistication about your subject matter, so it's important to offer both basic and more nuanced takeaway points.
Research Advice
5. Use a rifle, not a shotgun. I think this was attributed to Judge Easterbrook, and I'm not entirely sure what it means. I think it means that when you are trying to explain behavior, clarify your thinking and use as narrow and refined a theory as possible to get the job done.
6. Be ambitious. Be ambitious in choosing your projects (but careful, nuanced and patient in the execution of the project).
I have mixed feelings about "big" papers - I've read too many "Towards a New Theory of [subject] Law"-type papers that overpromise and underdeliver. But recently I also saw some amazing papers that show that younger scholars can indeed make important contributions. I guess we'd all rather see big papers with some flaws than a small paper on what the Supreme Court's holding in a v. b means for x industry in the state of Ames.
7. Don't understate your contribution. If your paper makes an incremental contribution, people will value it if they can see why the contribution matters.
8. Develop a rich theory. For empirical work, develop a rich, explicit theory of what explains the behavior you are studying before getting into the explanatory/data part of the paper. This applies whether the work is qualitative or quantitative. Otherwise the audience is left with lots of interesting explanations but no clear understanding of what it means.
9. Be explicit about weaknesses in the data/methodology. This builds trust with your audience.
Meta Advice
10. Develop more human capital. It's increasingly necessary to engage with papers from a variety of methodological approaches. This doesn't mean that we have to become quantitative empiricists, political scientists, philosophers, economists and historians. But if you don't understand some of the basics of other approaches, you'll be missing out.
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1. Posted by Gordon Smith on May 29, 2007 @ 8:23 | Permalink
Vic,
I am all on board with the first three.
Re #4 here is an alternative mantra: "One idea per presentation. Got two ideas? Save one for the next presentation." That is sometimes hard to do, and it looks like you are referring to themes and variations, which are almost always nice, I think.
##5-8 remind me of Llewellyn's Dueling Canons. There is some significant tension between using a rifle, on the one hand, and being ambitious and developing a rich theory, on the other. If you are all about being ambitious and developing a rich theory, the usual risk is not in understating the contribution but overstating.
#9 and #10 are solid takeaways.
2. Posted by Jake on May 29, 2007 @ 20:27 | Permalink
Speaking as a dumb ol' litigator who intrudes on this respectable blog, I think Vic's four points on presentation advice (the only part I'm even remotely qualified to comment on) are generally sound.
On #1, the key is to set priorities and choose the point you want most to communicate to your audience. That's how it works before federal judges, who generally have no more (and often less) attention span for an unfocused presentation than audiences of LawProfs.
On #2, what is a "discussant"? :-)
On #4, giving your audience takeaways is absolutely indispensable.
3. Posted by Jeff Lipshaw on May 30, 2007 @ 14:23 | Permalink
A "discussant" is a member of the presentation panel whose job is to be the one person in the room who has actually read the papers. The discussant will prove this by saying something like: "Professor Roe has produced an very interesting paper on mopery. I was particularly impressed by her incorporation of the availability heuristic into what has thus far been an exercise in either doctrinal explication or metaphysical meandering. But I wonder whether there are some significant questions left to be answered in the last five-sixths of the paper, not the least of which is a solid grounding in the application of fluid mechanics to this particular problem." Or some such.
4. Posted by Jake on May 30, 2007 @ 19:53 | Permalink
Thanks, Jeff. I was unfamiliar with the term, and appreciate the primer on its meaning.
