Dan Solove takes a look. An excerpt:
Most ideas can be stated clearly and in an accessible manner. I often find that a lot of academic scholarship, when boiled down to its ideas, is relatively straightforward and simple. Of course, we academics like to dress up our ideas to make them sound more elaborate, complex, and obtuse. But in the end, most ideas are simple. Often, however, our prose doesn’t invite people into our ideas but shuts them out. Perhaps we fear that if our articles didn’t take a lot of effort to plod through they wouldn’t seem as profound. If more people could understand them, then perhaps we’re not sophisticated enough as scholars. If we wrote in a lively and clear manner, then too many people might understand our ideas, and we might risk the perception that our ideas were too obvious and simple.
Maybe the answer is more lawprof bloggers. Blogging pushes you to write clearly and simply; the format rewards clarity of expression more than traditional law review articles do.
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