Thanks so much for your engagement with my post. You have all taken it in interesting directions, ones that my own post did not contemplate (largely because the question itself has layers of meaning and is itself open to many acute interpretations, as you’ve all demonstrated). It’s fun to think about these ideas out loud.

Just a couple thoughts. When I say that ‘who cares?’ rubs me wrong, I mean *at least* that I do not (often) write with the aim to influence policy — or with what some folks in the biz like to call a “normative payoff.” But as Orin rightly says, this isn’t saying all that much, as I think many people who like to write about the law don’t aim at policy change. Paul had a very nice recap of the Yale conference dealing with Professor Balkin’s edited volume on “The Constitution in 2020″ that dealt with some of these sorts of issues. I take his “category 1″ folks to be writing with this sort of payoff in mind (these were scholars on the political left, to be sure, but the phenomenon certainly can occur on the political right as well).

And, of course, I am certainly writing “to be understood,” or perhaps it’s better to say that there is an unspoken assumption in my writing (as, I would expect, in most academics’ writing) that I intend to be understood. This is the reason that I can’t agree with those commenters here and in the post on Prawfs that say that I ought to just keep a diary and not publish in journals. I do hope and want my writing to be understood — and I agree that if my writing were not understood by anyone (except, I guess, me) that I would count that as a major failing. A very large part of the pleasure of writing (something I emphasized in my post) is the pleasure of being understood. I have enjoyed that pleasure, to greater and lesser degrees, in this comment thread.

But I do think that Orin is right that I mean something more than simply the normative payoff point. When I write, I am not writing for *conscious* influence. I do not have in mind an audience that I think — ‘they’re really going to be blown away by this point,’ or ‘I’m contributing to X debate and am really altering the state of thinking in the field.’ Instead, I am often only writing to express my thoughts and ideas — *whether or not* (indeed, mindless of) the folks who’ve written about similar sorts of things buy it, like it, are persuaded, or despise it as utter garbage. I write, that is, for me — because I have thoughts about X issue and it is a pleasure to labor (again, and again, and again) to get the idea chiseled just right (it never is just right) — until I am satisified with it, whether or not any putative audience might be satisfied with it.

But on reflection, Orin is probably right that one always (or generally) has a “sense” of one’s audience. Here I think Orin and I converge. The question is the degree to which that sense guides (controls?) the way in which one’s ideas come to find life and expression. And as to that point, Orin and I may diverge a bit, but I am not entirely certain.

Again — thanks to all of you.

Marc DeGirolami

Sorry, folks. You may think your writing turns out just fine without your having to think about your audience, but I find it difficult to agree that your writing cannot be improved by attention to your likely or desired reader and his or her needs.

And, working on law review, I saw plenty of badly-written, self-indulgent articles that evidently benefited from no such attention.

BC: . . . The purpose of writing is to convey ideas get citations by other law professors and tenure; if the author does not trouble himself to make those ideas accessible to the likely recipients of the communication administrators deciding on tenure, then the author may as well not have bothered to write at all have to find a job as a real lawyer.

Fixed.

veal calf is redundant, but I’m writing for a skimming audience, so I call it emphasis.

When I arrive at the veal calf office, the guys who pay me don’t care why I decided to come in, they just want a product. I assume Marc’s paymasters are no different.

The reason we allow (even require) law professors to engage in scholarship is that scholarship advances the field, not to pay professors to keep diaries of their ideas.

It may be a bit off point, but I think that’s an interesting line to draw. When I write the first draft of a brief or article I’m often writing as much to clarify my own thoughts on a particular legal matter as I am thinking about my writing will be received. (although audience definitely plays a part)

Similarly, when I’m reading a law review article I’m often looking for new ways of conceptualizing a particular law or case or theory, which in turn helps me to understand and write about it.

I think those two ideas are related, and, to a certain extent, a professor who isn’t writing for a particular audience or purpose, but merely expositing ideas for the sake of putting the ideas down on paper ties into that goal. There’s ground between a “diary of ones ideas” and thinking of articles as primarily “calls for action” or even “progressing the scholarship” on a particular topic.

Imagine yourself as an author sitting down to start a new law review article. At the most basic level, you need to choose a language. You need to pick a level of complication in your language. You need to know how much to explain concepts, and how much to take things for granted.

I would argue that much of this is determined by the format or the medium in which the writing will take place.

Imagine writing the same article as a blog post. With easy access to Wikipedia, you can refer to complex concepts and implicitly summarize your background information with a simple link. You can refer to events and their import without writing out the full explanation by using in-page links (for example, the role of WWII in advancing the Bretton Woods system). Without linking technology, some aspects of an argument would have to be explicitely written out in order to provide a stand-alone argument that anyone could pick up and judge.

If you wrote the same argument as a speech you were giving, you could augment your arguments or provide supporting data using visual aids in a Powerpoint presentation, which removes the need to mention the data in the speech text itself. If you were writing a book, you could provide dump supporting arguments into appendices, footnotes, or a bibliography. (Do high schools still teach students how to construct those?) If you were writing the same book as an e-book formatted for Amazon’s Kindle, you could include more arcane words, and let any confused readers utilize the built in dictionary.

The classic quote at the start of every high school speech class textbook still holds true: the medium is the message. If DeGirolami feels that he doesn’t need to consider his audience while writing a law review article, maybe we need to look at the medium in which he is publishing them. His foreknowledge of that medium conveys unspoken assumptions to him that could be influencing his outlook as an author.

On the same note–it is very possible that Orin’s chosen medium for his response, i.e. a law-oriented blog, is affecting his reaction to DeGirolami’s views!

Paul writes: ” I don’t think Marc is writing for “no audience.””

Paul, I guess I’m not entirely sure how to square these. I see Marc as saying more than that he doesn’t write scholarship with a clear immediate normative goal (which is would be a very narrow claim that few would question, I think). Rather, he seems to be making a much broader point, that when he writes he does not write with an audience in mind (” I usually give no thought at all to whom I am writing “for.””). Perhaps I am just misreading Marc, and he can clarify for us?

I will say, given the gap between “legal scholarship” and actual the law-smithing that goes on in judge’s chambers and legislative bodies, the one audience DeGirolami shouldn’t care about is practicing lawyers.

You have a point. Maybe the professor is lucky enough that his musings are interesting and persuasive to others without trying, but few are that lucky. And as others have pointed out, one problem too many lawyers have is forgetting our audience.

The reason to write is that one enjoys to write – one enjoys seeing the solitary process of writing unfolding within oneself afresh, again and again. One delights in the ways in which ideas are styled and thoughts chiseled over the span of a writing life. . . .

More than this, however, to ask “who cares?” too insistently of one’s writing is to strip away the aesthetic core of it, to deny that writing, very much including legal academic writing, is a delight. To ask “who cares?” is to replace that edification with dusty and contrived manoeuvre, all for the sake of what one calculates (probably erroneously) to be foreseeable practical influence. What a waste.

That’s a find justification for an avocation. But why should anyone pay you for your writing?

Professor DeGirolami asks “who cares” who his audience is. The people paying his salary should. If he’s keeping a diary for his own indulgence, perhaps the dean at the St. John’s University School of Law should assign the professor a couple more classes to teach.

On one hand there are “rhetorical” categories of audiences. If you know law review article readers will think “Congress can outlaw swearing” is batty, but you think it’s “true,” you’ll have to go to greater lengths to be persuasive than if you argue “Congress can outlaw killing.”

On the other hand, there are “ideological” categories of audiences. When deciding if you can or want to argue that “Congress can outlaw swearing,” you shouldn’t think about what various people will think if you do.

Forgive the “rhetorical” and “ideological.” It’s late.

The quoted passage reminded me a bit of a Nietzschean view of audience: an explicit disavowal of political goals, and stated disinterest in convincing any particular set of actual people who might currently exist, instead sticking to an elucidation of issues as he personally saw them. Of course, Nietzsche did consider that an audience of sorts, explicitly addressing an absent audience of “philosophers of the future”.