Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
Bonus Episode: The Plagiarism Taboo with Brian Frye
Brian Frye and I engage in academic navel gazing, discuss scholarly shit posting, and argue about the virtues of plagiarism. A fun time was had!
My guest today is one of the most unusual and creative voices in the legal academy, Brian Frye, the Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky. He teaches classes in civil procedure, intellectual property, copyright, and nonprofit organizations, as well as a seminar on law and popular culture. Today we’re engaging in academic navel gazing and opining on plagiarism, law review publishing, and plagiarism.
Brian is also a filmmaker. He produced the documentary Our Nixon (2013), which was broadcast by CNN and opened theatrically nationwide. His short films and videos have shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among other venues, and are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His critical writing on film and art has appeared in October, The New Republic, Film Comment, Cineaste, Senses of Cinema, and Incite! among other journals.
Additionally, Professor Frye also produces a podcast that I highly recommend, Ipse Dixit https://shows.pippa.io/ipse-dixit
Okay, now, now we're recording. I don't know what's wrong with my brain. I don't know. I forgot. It's summer. Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell, but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravick. My guest today is one of the most unusual and creative voices in the legal academy, Brian Frye. the Spears Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky. He teaches classes in civil procedure, intellectual property, copyright, and nonprofit organizations, as well as a seminar on law and popular culture. Today, we're engaging in academic navel-gazing and opining on plagiarism, law review publishing, and more. Brian is also a filmmaker. He produced the documentary, R. Nixon, which was produced by CNN and opened theatrically nationwide. His short films and videos have shown in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the New York Film Festival, and the San Francisco International Film Festival, among other venues, and are in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His critical writing on film and art has appeared in October, The New Republic, Film Comment, Senses of Cinema, and Insight, among other journals. Additionally, Brian produces a podcast that I highly recommend, The Ipsy Dixit podcast. Yes. So tell me first how you became interested in writing about plagiarism.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, I think it grew out of my interest in intellectual property and specifically in copyright doctrine and thinking about reasons to be skeptical of the efficiency of plagiarism. copyright doctrine and sort of the framing of copyright as ultimately being a kind of utilitarian or consequentialist tool for producing socially optimal outcomes. And so I think a big part of like my developing interest in plagiarism was, you know, realizing that a lot of people had weighed in on copyright as a policy tool for maximizing social welfare, but there was a surprising to me sort of lacuna in people thinking about plagiarism in the same terms. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that a lot of the same arguments you could deploy against copyright as a policy tool for achieving optimal outcomes could equally well be deployed against plagiarism norms. And then as someone with a background in the arts, I did an MFA and worked as an artist in a programmer and arts writer for many years before going to law school, it occurred to me that norms around attribution and norms around copying in the art world are very different than norms around attribution and copying in other discursive communities, including legal academia and academia writ large. And so I thought about the kind of work that I did as an artist and asked myself sort of why can't we think about the practice of legal scholarship? in the same terms. And in a lot of ways, I feel like the kind of the work I did on plagiarism led me to start thinking about a lot of the legal scholarship I did and that I was interested in doing as actually a sort of artistic medium as opposed to a scholarly medium. So I currently like to think of myself as an artist who works or conceptual artist who works in the medium of legal scholarship.
SPEAKER_01:That reminds me both of your trilogy paper, which I want us to talk That was hilarious, by the way, as well as some of your, and I read them when they came out, but didn't review them for this, but I know that you like did an NFT of your no action letter or a no action letter of your NFT. I can't actually, maybe
SPEAKER_00:both. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think my scholarship was getting increasingly eclectic over the years, but my SEC no action letter request paper was the first time, I like to call it activated legal scholarship, as it were. So what I did was, it was create a work of legal scholarship that was intended as a work of conceptual art, right? So in that SEC no action letter request letter, what I did was propose, or rather, I kind of characterized it as a prospectus for the sale of a work of conceptual art titled SEC no action letter request, which consists of sending a no action letter request to the SEC proposing to sell a work of conceptual art titled SEC no action letter requests and explaining to them why what I'm proposing to do is under their own rules and under the Supreme Court's Howey test, the sale of an unregistered security. And so then in the no action letter request, I tell them for all the aforementioned reasons, you should prohibit me from doing what I'm proposing to do. A friend of mine actually referred to it as the first SEC action letter request. Like, please regulate. Please stop
SPEAKER_01:me, SEC.
SPEAKER_00:Right. But the whole, the project was really to sort of demonstrate through the paper, the proposition that I was trying to make. And for me, that was a really interesting and important development because I'd been thinking about this problem for many years, right? It occurred to me when I was working at Sullivan and Cromwell doing like securities regulation, litigation oriented work that the, The art market and the securities market were kind of structurally basically identical. And for many years, I've been thinking, well, how do I write this paper? And how do I explain what I see as being this kind of structural similarity and how to think about it and what the problem might be? And it just didn't, it didn't write, you know, like as a paper, it just felt like really flat. And I was like, I can't do this. And it wasn't until I realized that what I needed to do was actually show people what I was talking about and make them engage with it as an actual practice, as opposed to a kind of abstract description. And I realized when I did that, I was like, oh my God, this is great. Like it's a whole different way of doing scholarship for me. That's so much more engaged and so much more sort of exciting because you can see it happening in front of you. And so I've kind of tried to bring some of that quality into the work I've done subsequently where the projects are not necessarily intended to be taken entirely literally or entirely at face value. And in a lot of cases, and this was true before that as well, but you're like, for me a lot of it is like you know they're in they're kind of like an inside joke or a troll I was going to
SPEAKER_01:say, would you be offended if I called you the academic equivalent of a shit poster, which I mean in a positive way.
SPEAKER_00:Look, look, look, basically, I would say like at this point, 75% of the papers I post to SSRN have trolling. Maybe
SPEAKER_01:I don't have the proper definitions of shit poster and troll. But to me, a shit poster is better than a troll because the shit poster has a point and it's kind of just like won't stop. pestering you about it, right? And they're not really being serious, but there's something serious in there. Whereas a troll is just annoying to me. So that's why I called you a shit poster instead of a troll.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for me, it's like, I like to think of like an idealized form of trolling. Okay, got it. Sort of trolling out of love, you know? Like, you know, the heartfelt form of trolling where everyone's included. Okay, I
SPEAKER_01:like that. That's nice. You're an inclusive troll. You're not troll That's right. That's right. That's right.
SPEAKER_00:I started a whole other like kind of line of like argumentation around like intellectual property and specifically copyright owners as landlords, right? And it's a troll because I want people to like admit to themselves that that's what, it's not nothing, you know, like I said, nothing wrong with being a landlord. It's totally fine. That's a totally legitimate line of business, right? Landlords provide an important social service, right? If we didn't have landlords, we would have a very like- I'd be homeless at the moment, yeah. Yeah, right? And we need landlords to provide liquidity in housing Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01:I wanted to start with scholarly plagiarism because that's the norms that I'm most familiar with. But it would be interesting, actually, to have you point out any similarities and differences with other artistic communities. I'm not persuaded yet about your anti-plagiarism norms, but maybe you will persuade me. As you point out, it's a community norm, which isn't to me necessarily inefficient or negative, although it could be. But that standing alone, the fact that it's sort of, as you say, a cartel, isn't something I guess, first of all, describe to me as you see it, this academic scholarly norm, and then tell me what you see as being different or similar or whatever in other relevant comparison communities that you're familiar with, much more familiar with than I am.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so that's a really interesting question. What I've come to realize is that plagiarism norms are hyper-localized and hyper-historically contingent. And my working hypothesis is that that's a function of the fact that plagiarism norms are a... reaction to what i like to refer to as a scholarly gift to keep uh scholarly economy that same that yeah
SPEAKER_01:that seemed totally right to me this is this is the coin of the realm for us right attribution as you point out is the coin of the realm for us and so that part i found i found quite persuasive but keep going i didn't i didn't mean to interrupt you yeah
SPEAKER_00:not at all not at all and i think that that's been true for thousands of years
SPEAKER_02:yeah
SPEAKER_00:right i mean so plagiarism norms long predate copyright, right? And in fact, copyright is essentially a kind of a function of technological development. And I think contingent upon technological development, right? We didn't have a concept of copyright prior to the introduction of the printing press and other forms of reproduction, relatively inexpensive technologies for reproducing works of authorship. But prior to the introduction of the printing press, we still had At various points in time, various different concepts of plagiarism, I think all of which were a reaction among the sort of broader discursive communities of authors working in different societies with different kind of literary economies to what was ultimately perceived as being beneficial in terms of maximizing their ability to capture the sort of economic value or some portion of, I guess we would call it the spillovers or the positive externality associated with the production of works of authorship is really contingent upon what the economy looked like in any particular society. And I think that the plagiarism rights we have today are effectively the same kind of thing. And as you say, I mean, I don't necessarily think that that's bad or inefficient. I do think it's self-interested, right? And so the real point that I want to make is not that we shouldn't have plagiarism norms, but that we should be honest with ourselves why we have them, what they mean, and what they're for, right? Because my real concern is that we've internalized these plagiarism norms and normativized them in ways that are not connected to the actual goals that we say we want to achieve, right? And so it's not that I'm saying that like affirmatively we shouldn't have the norms or that you shouldn't care about attribution or anything like that. What I'm saying is you should think about what we're trying to accomplish. Okay. Okay. That helps. bananas what we do, right? Because on one level, we say, okay, we've adopted these kind of plagiarism norms, academic plagiarism norms that are about scholarship. Okay, fine, whatever. That is what it is. And I think that's a conversation to have. And I've tried to kind of enter or engage that conversation in later papers. Then we say, well, we're going to take these plagiarism norms we devised for a community of scholars and apply them to our students who are essentially being trained to go out into the workforce. Well, first off, why? Right. I mean, why are we doing that with our students? Why do we care if our students are plagiarizing? Most of them, almost all of them are not producing public facing work in the first place. Right. What they're doing is is producing assignments for their professors. Why do we care if they're attributing properly or kind of like adopting the same norms that we're adopting as scholars? We're doing something totally different from what they're doing. So shouldn't we have different norms for them than we have for ourselves? But we don't. We actually apply exactly the same norms. In fact, we apply them even more harshly. to students than we do to ourselves, right? We never ask the question, what actually promotes learning? right? We just say we're going to apply these plagiarism norms. We're going to prohibit copying in our students no matter what. We never ask, what if copying actually helps our students learn, right? In lots of other fields, like say art or music, right? We encourage copying, right? We want students to copy. Copying is part of the learning process. Why do we assume that copying isn't part of the learning process when it comes to our students in writing-based fields? It's not obvious to me, and it actually makes very little sense. I mean, copying is how we learn how to And then even worse, right? What do we do as a consequence? We say, well, we don't want students to plagiarize because plagiarizing would be detrimental to learning. I think that's probably wrong. But even if we accept that's true, if our goal in having plagiarism norms is to promote student learning and to encourage our students to do things that are going to be good for learning and going to be good for them in the long run. What do we do when we catch them plagiarizing? We punish them incredibly harshly. In fact, in some cases, we expel them from school. How is that good for learning?
SPEAKER_01:Let's talk then more about the student context, because to me, each context is different, right? And I think it goes to the point you started with, which is that these norms are all part of a very particular community and are there to serve the goals of that community. And so with plagiarism in the student context, I would distinguish between plagiarism with the goal of learning and and plagiarism with the goal of evaluation. And I don't, I may be wrong, but to me, all the plagiarism cases that I'm familiar with, where we try to punish somebody for plagiarizing, comes in the evaluation context, not in the learning context. I mean, I guess my response to you would be, listen, the goal of the evaluation is to evaluate student learning and or talent relative to all of the other students in the class, right, especially in law school because of the mandatory curb. And so plagiarism norms promote that by ensuring, sorry, anti-plagiarism norms, I guess I should say, promote that by ensuring that you're evaluating the student in question and not somebody else. And that's the same thing with the honor code rules that prohibit copying from another student, which maybe that goes under the plagiarism rubric, but, you know, strikes me as being perhaps a little bit different. I guess in that context, I don't see what's wrong. I don't think you have to have an anti-plagiarism norm, right? But it does strike me as odd that if I, as the teacher, am able to say, okay, it can be open book or closed book. I decide. It can be timed or not. I decide. It can be word limited or not. I decide. And I can decide whether or not you have to attribute all non-original words. thoughts, material, however we want to describe. It's up to me as the teacher. And so why is that problematic in your view? Okay,
SPEAKER_00:well, I would put it this way, right? In the practice of law, if you're not plagiarizing, you're committing malpractice. Yes. So if what we're trying to do is evaluate, as law professors in particular, if what we're trying to do is evaluate whether or not students are going to be good at the practice of law, not only should we be encouraging them to plagiarize, we should be teaching them how. And we should be teaching them how to do it better because that's what they're going to be doing in practice, right? So I think in the practice of law, it makes like even less sense than in other disciplines to be applying these kinds of rigid plagiarism norms without thinking through what it is we're trying to accomplish in the first place. And you're right. Like academic freedom says that professors can make any kinds of choices they want to in terms of the pedagogical sort of approaches that they're taking. But the fact that we let teachers do that doesn't necessarily mean that they're right. And if they're wrong, and if the choices that professors are making are actually detrimental to student learning and detrimental to student outcomes, maybe we as institutions should tell professors, you need to stop doing that because it's shitty teaching.
SPEAKER_01:So maybe. So again- Each setting is different, right? So let's go to legal practice, which you just brought up. And I understand what you're saying is that if the goal is to turn our students into lawyers doing legal practice, then we need to train and grade them in what's relevant to legal practice. And of course, you're right. You say it's malpractice not to copy the work of others in legal practice, which of course is right. The goal there is completely different, which is to win. I'm putting that in air quotes here, for the client at the lowest possible cost. So failing to use the industry standard or the clause that the court has already interpreted in a favorable way or reinventing the wheel so that you waste your client money. All of that would be disserving your client. And so the different plagiarism norms, and there they are, pro-plagiarism norms, make sense in that context.
SPEAKER_00:Although what's really interesting for me about the practice of law is is that there are a number of cases in which judges have criticized and even sanctioned attorneys. And the judges claim or state that the reason that they're sanctioning the attorney is because the attorney has plagiarized, right? But it's not actually true, right? So my favorite example is a case where the attorney essentially turned in a brief that had been entirely copied from a, from a treatise, right? The entire brief was just copied word for word from a treatise. And the, but the attorney didn't attribute what he was copying to the treatise and he won, right? It was a successful brief. He won the, and then subsequently submitted a bill, like billing the other party who was then liable for like 40 hours of work like that. And the judge sanctioned the attorney, and the judge characterized the basis for the sanction as the fact that the attorney had copied from the treatise without attributing to the treatise. Okay,
SPEAKER_01:so that's interesting because what he did wrong is overbilling.
SPEAKER_00:That's right. Well, not just that, though. I think that's true, right? So I agree the attorney should have been sanctioned, and he should have been sanctioned for billing for work that he didn't actually do. That he didn't do. He should, in my opinion, have copied the treatise, and he should have billed for the half hour or hour or whatever it took him to copy from the treatise, right? So he should have been sanctioned for billing for time he didn't work. But in my opinion, he also should have been sanctioned in that particular circumstance for not attributing, not because it was plagiarism, but because the reason he didn't attribute was that he wanted to plausibly claim that he had done the work himself. And the fact is, in that case, it would have been a stronger brief, an even stronger brief, had he attributed it to to the treatise because then it would be a third party. Right.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Incredible
SPEAKER_00:third party. Yeah. Rather than like it would have been stronger to attribute. So the problem wasn't the attribution because attribution was morally necessary. The problem was the lack of attribution because the attribution would have increased the persuasiveness he was making. And the only reason he didn't attribute was he wanted to essentially defraud his client and or the court about the amount of work that he'd done. But the problem wasn't plagiarism.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, okay. So let's go back educational setting because unfortunately for me, since I started out by saying I wasn't persuaded yet, you're being remarkably persuasive here. So let's go back. I do see you have a point, but it does presume, and maybe your objection is not about Let me just say, your objection is maybe broader than anti-plagiarism norms, but about what we're training our students to do. Because I recognize that there is some benefit then to training them to go find the proper precedent or form and copy it properly and change the things that are supposed to be changed. I'm not teaching them that. I'm just not. And most of us aren't, and we don't want to. And... Whether we're right or wrong, we want to think that at least high-level legal practice is more than that. Sure, that's what all of us did as junior associates, but eventually you're aspiring to do something different than that, and that requires analytical skills and creativity. I may be wrong about all of this. I grant you that this is a perhaps... I'm somebody who left private practice because I found it so boring, right? But nonetheless, I think that this really... isn't a complaint about anti-plagiarism norms so much as you just think that we're training them to do pointless stuff. We're training them to be us instead of what they're going to be. Is that part of it? Am I on
SPEAKER_00:base? Yeah, I mean, I think that's certainly one point. And this is what I, when it comes to the plagiarism kind of big picture project for me, the point is not to say, I know how we should do things. The point is to say, we should be thinking critically about what we're doing and why we're doing it, right? And that we can't just take these rules for granted, right? We have to have rules for a reason. And we have to be confident that when we develop these rules and interpret these rules and apply these rules and sanction people for violating these rules, that we have a good and justified reason for doing it. And my concern is that when it comes to plagiarism norms, we are extremely resistant to thinking critically and normatively about what we're trying to accomplish and why. And I think that that's a
SPEAKER_01:problem. So then in your own assignments and your own evaluations, do you incorporate plagiarism exercise? Do you put your money where your mouth is in the classroom? Yes. Okay. Why doesn't that surprise me?
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, in my seminar class, I encourage my students to plagiarize.
SPEAKER_01:Is your seminar about plagiarism? What's the topic? No. So
SPEAKER_00:nominally, the title of the seminar is IP Theory. Okay. But I don't know. And there's room for, obviously, there's room for disagreement here. My general feeling is that learning how to do legal scholarship is really hard. really, really hard,
SPEAKER_01:right? Most of
SPEAKER_00:us aren't good at it, even despite having a lot of practice. articles every class that are intended to demonstrate different ways of thinking about doing legal scholarship. One that I've found particularly effective is Pierre Schlag's article. Love that piece. Oh,
SPEAKER_01:yeah. It's
SPEAKER_00:brilliant. It's a wonderfully kind of recursive piece of criticism, but ironically, it also does a really good job of demonstrating to students the kind of unfortunate like structure of legal scholarship as a literary medium,
SPEAKER_02:right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And for me, that's really interesting because part of my project has been to kind of think about legal scholarship, not merely as a kind of transparent vehicle for disseminating a set of arguments or ideas, but as a medium for engaging in an artistic enterprise. And I think that Pierre Schlag did a great job of that. And a lot of what I've been trying to do recently is think about how you can use legal scholarship to do something in and of itself and to be an artistic project on its own without just being a kind of transparent vehicle for something else.
SPEAKER_01:And I assume that that is a very popular seminar. I mean, I would take that seminar.
SPEAKER_00:I think a lot of the students think I'm a little weird, but, you know, they when they let themselves go, they get in the flow.
SPEAKER_01:Why take a boring professor when you can take an interesting and weird one? I know that you've presented these papers at academic conferences and stuff. What's the reaction there? And we haven't talked yet about academic plagiarism. I want to get to that. But
SPEAKER_00:what's the main reaction? My favorite example. right? This one was great. At Ohio State, like an IP conference, like many, many years ago, I presented a paper called Equitable Resale Royalties, right? So essentially in the art world, there's long been this idea that there should be resale royalties or rather that artists should in effect be entitled to like a cut of every subsequent transaction in the works that they produce. The concern, of course, is that, you know, artists sell the stuff into the art market and then it goes up in value and the collectors reap all the rewards and the rewards don't go to the artists. And so the artists are always like, well, you know, I sold that work for$10,000 20 years ago and now it's worth 3 million and the collector gets everything and I get nothing. And that's not fair. I should get a percentage of the future sales. So I took that at face value and said, you're right. It's unfair. You know, that artists it's inequitable. We should really care more about equity. But then I, the, the premise of the paper was, well, you know, what's even more inequitable is that the only artists who benefit from resale roads is the successful ones. What about all the unsuccessful artists who sold the work and then it went down in value, right? I mean, they're not going to get anything from these, and they can't even sell the new work for more money, right? This is super inequitable, right? So that's the inequity we should really be focusing on is how do we make sure that we benefit all of those unsuccessful artists, right? Propose a bunch of different like mechanisms we could use. Well, funnel through the NEA, for example, or, you know, you could do it with tax forms, right? Just say, have a little box that says, I'm an artist. And then you get a percentage of whatever resale royalties are collected. And if
SPEAKER_01:we care about encouraging and subsidizing art that is not going to be subsidized through the marketplace, that seems to be the logical, some version of what
SPEAKER_00:you're proposing. Absolutely logical, right? So I'm presenting this paper and my friends who know me in the audience are giggling. I finished the paper and there's like a bunch of people who I don't know are sort of like furrowed brows. You're like, what? Raise your hands like that doesn't sound like recent royalties at all. That's the point, right? The whole paper is intended as a troll. And the fact that you didn't get it makes me love it even more. And Kim, what's really interesting to me about that is that it transgresses the norms of doing and presenting on this scholarship. Because the assumption in our discursive community is that when you write a paper, when you present a paper, you mean what you're saying. But why does it have to be? Why can't we have more fun? Why can't we be more creative? Why can't we treat our medium as an artistic medium that you can use in different ways for different purposes? It makes people very frustrated and upset when you don't do things the right way. The right way is so boring. Do
SPEAKER_01:you think there's more freedom for that in, I don't know, a more artistic discipline? I'm sure that all my friends in the humanities are going to write in with hate mail and say, no, they're actually more rigorous because they have peer review. We actually have an enormous amount of freedom as
SPEAKER_00:compared to every other discipline. Do we really? Well, but we are... In theory,
SPEAKER_01:you can do anything you want to, right? But there are costs. and our informal desire to appear serious and rigorous, all the more prominent and heartfelt.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I mean, seriously, how unusual is it for people to violate any, like the entire thing that makes Pierre Schlag's article so funny is that it's so true. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. No, it wouldn't be good if you were just
SPEAKER_01:like criticizing. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00:There is no literary genre more boring or conventional, right? than the law review article. And that's entirely self-imposed. We do that not because anyone's making us do it. We do it because we don't know how to do it any different. And we do it because it makes other people uncomfortable when you don't do it the right way. And I'll be honest, I've experienced a lot of like, love me or hate me, right? I mean, like a lot of people like what I'm doing. I know a lot of people think it's terrible. You know, like, how dare you do this kind of thing? You're not supposed to do that. You're not allowed to do that. I don't like that.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:You know,
SPEAKER_01:what about law review? editors who, in my experience, are the most interested in sticking to the roadmap of what we're supposed to be doing. Thou shalt not use the passive voice. Thou shalt not not have a roadmap at the beginning of your article. Yeah. We don't allow abstracts in this journal. What?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I have, you know, it's interesting to me that I've had a lot of, as you can imagine, like struggles with law review editors. I've generally lucked out in the sense that, you To the extent that they accept the stuff in the first place. Then they're really into it. Yeah, I get it. But there's definitely like a real, like a few of it. Like I actually had an editor last year at Virginia and she was amazing. Like probably the best I've ever had. Like really
SPEAKER_01:like. Yay, Virginia students.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I had this little paper, Karl Marx, literary landlord, and she was phenomenal. Turned it around super fast, had really thoughtful, productive comments and suggestions, very focused. And I was like, it was amazing. She did the best job. Other ones... it's a little bit more of a struggle, you know, to get them to realize like, no, I'm not like, I'm not asking you to rewrite this for me. I'm not going to add additional citations. You know, I, you know, there's a little bit with some of them that can be more of a struggle. It really just depends. I started to realize that in a lot of ways. And like, I mean, you know, my other big bugaboo is like the entire journal structure to begin with. Well,
SPEAKER_01:this one we share, right? I mean, you and I have discussed this on Twitter before. We might have different I find your proposal to be superior to the status quo, but not superior to a peer review system.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, but Kim, I have an even better proposal.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, you do? Wait, because the last proposal I saw that you had was for publishing in our home journal.
SPEAKER_00:My subsequent proposal was to have a universal law journal. Right. So we just get rid of all the all the individual law journals and have everyone published in the universal. Right. And you just get a citation. Right. But I can do even better than that. Right. Because I realized, Kim, I realized that
SPEAKER_01:you but you want no go. I want better gatekeeping. You want no gatekeeping. Yeah, well, no, no. Because you're an anarchist at the end of
SPEAKER_00:the day. Yes, but Kim, I realized that anarchy is unrealistic because we law professors love our hierarchies, but I have a better solution, right, Kim? Kim, this is the 21st century. We need a solution that's technological. Okay. That's on the blockchain, Kim. Oh, God, Brian. We need law general NFTs, right? Because we know... We know that law journal placement is valuable, right? Kim, you're an economically minded person, right? I was just going to say,
SPEAKER_01:can I make money from this proposal?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly, right? There's a lot of money being left on the table, right? Think about all of the people and institutions that would pay cold, hard cash for a prestigious law review placement, right? But that is not available, right? You have to like, we're in a line waiting scenario. Kim, that's inefficient. Very, very inefficient. So what we need to do is is NFT law review placements, therefore they become tradable, right? And say you as a law professor, you want to like increase your profile, maybe like lateral to a fancy school like Virginia, right? But what do you do? You go out there and buy two or three Harvard law review NFTs,
SPEAKER_01:bam. This brings me to your ghostwriting example, because this is interesting to me to think about why that doesn't violate the norms in the fields where ghostwriting, where we know that ghostwriting is the thing, which now correct me if I'm wrong. I think that's mostly when people are writing, say, biographies or is that mostly the ghostwriter genre? No,
SPEAKER_00:I mean, like pretty much any popular fiction is full of ghostwriters. I mean, like most of the big name authors, like I don't read any of this stuff, like James Patterson,
SPEAKER_01:maybe. I don't know. Well, it's not ghostwritten, though. They put it on there.
SPEAKER_00:Some of them do. Some of them don't. I see. So some of them
SPEAKER_01:don't. Oh, OK.
SPEAKER_00:It's been around forever. I mean, having people ghostwrite popular material like that, that's super duper common. But, you know, you know what other genre it's it's super popular in is like university presidents.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, their speeches and things. Yeah, those are all goods written. Right. They don't have time. Right. How could they have time for all that?
SPEAKER_00:Wait a minute. Aren't they academics who are subject to plagiarism norms and all that kind of stuff? And why is it okay for them to have somebody else write stuff and then put their name on it?
SPEAKER_01:Part of it is, again, I think just the expectation and norms of the community. I guess the simplest answer, I'm sympathetic to your notion that academic plagiarism norms are not about the reader. They're about the authors, right? That seems right to me, which makes my answer to this one unsatisfying. because it's about the reader. I mean, my simplest answer was that the audience is interested in the story, not the writing ability of the purported author. I actually didn't realize how widespread it was in fiction, though. That makes more sense if I'm interested in Lance Armstrong's story, not whether Lance Armstrong can construct a sentence, right? It makes... less sense to me with fiction. And it's completely unlike academic writing, right? So you brought up the NFTs of the law review placements. Cass Sunstein, for example, he has never invited me to write something with him. What if I paid him a few thousand dollars to co-author a paper with me? I bet it would get read a lot more than my other papers, but that would probably reflect badly on both of us. But I do think there are versions of that that must happen. What if I have an invite to a fancy conference in Bermuda And I say, hey, I can get you invitation as my co-author if you co-author a paper with me for the conference volume, Cass Sunstein, and you want to go to Bermuda.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, Kim, in a lot of fields, that's par for the course. Exactly. Exactly. But we
SPEAKER_01:wouldn't pay, right? But it's a non-monetary, it's a payment in kind of various sorts. But I don't think that it would be, I think if somebody said, Oh, yeah. I wrote a paper with Kim because she paid me six thousand dollars.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly. And part of the point that I'm trying to make with a lot of this is not that I'm making a serious proposal. It's that I'm encouraging people to think about what they're actually doing as opposed to what they like to pretend. And, you know. Given what we're already doing, how is that meaningfully different from just paying someone in cash? Doing it in kind, why can't we just put a dollar value on
SPEAKER_01:it? Because there would be no need for this podcast, Brian, if that were the world we lived in, I would have nothing to write about.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I know. And that's why I love your work, right? Because what you're pointing to is the way that people have these moral intuitions that they're not willing to question. And what do we do? with those kinds of moral intuitions, how should we think about them and should we take them seriously or not? And so like a lot of what I'm trying to do in my work is like intentionally transgress a lot of moral intuitions that we collectively think are really important, right? As a way of encouraging people to think more critically about what we're doing and why we're doing it. Like one thing that's been really interesting to me, like in the IP sector, of scholarship, there's been a whole movement of people talking about informal property norms. And lots of really interesting critical work. We talk about this norm and that norm. But what's been really funny for me is the people who are working in informal property norms never include plagiarism instead of the norms that they're talking about. And I don't think it's intentional, but I also think that even the people who are working in that area don't like to think about plagiarism norms as just being another informal property.
SPEAKER_01:All right, so let's talk about plagiarism norms then in the scholarly setting. And again, you can make analogies to their artistic or communities that you're more familiar with than I am. What do you view as the problem with anti-plagiarism norms there? Well, I think that one of the fundamental
SPEAKER_00:problems I have in terms of how they're actually implemented is that I think they're, they deeply reinforce existing academic hierarchies. Right.
SPEAKER_01:So I feel like it's because, so this is one of the things that just caught me up with your paper and I'm sure people have brought this up to you before and you would, you address the race and gender issue a little bit in the sub row sub portion. I am sure that you have seen those cartoons where there's a group of people around a conference table and the woman says something and everybody just keeps yada, yada, yada. And then the man at the table says the exact same thing and everybody's like, oh, what a great idea. And so the perception from women and minorities in academia already is that we can say stuff, the white guy says the exact same thing and they get the attention. And so my reading of it is actually explicitly the opposite. If they don't even have to attribute anything to us, then we'll never get any credit for anything. The only hope is that they have to say, see so-and-so or whatever.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I mean, I guess my response to that would be like has many elements, right? I mean, one element would be, I agree that's a huge problem, but I think we need to address that problem head on rather than through proxies. I don't think
SPEAKER_01:it's a proxy for it. I just think it's part of it. To me, the anti-plagiarism norm is serving a different purpose, the one that you first pointed out. It's our compensation. It's our coin of the realm. It's our mechanism for getting scholarly esteem. But the lack of it, to me at least, would operate differently. more negatively for junior people, for women, for people of color. That would be my instinct. And I think that instinct is shared by not all, of course, right? We're not a monolithic whole, but by many other women and minorities in the academy.
SPEAKER_00:Sure, sure, sure. And I really want to emphasize, I'm very cognizant of and extremely sympathetic to those concerns. But again, I would say, I think we need to address those concerns directly. I would also say we've had plagiarism norms for 2000 years and they haven't done much of anything to mitigate any of those concerns. In fact, in some respects, I think they've actually made it worse. And I'll talk about that in just a moment. Right. For another thing, just as a kind of a big picture observation. Right. When I think social justice and equity, I don't think more property rights. Right.
SPEAKER_01:You see, I might differ on that one, though.
SPEAKER_00:I don't necessarily not think. property rights. But I don't think that that's always the right solution. Maybe sometimes is, but it isn't always. For another thing, my concern is that what plagiarism norms do in practice is create a benefit for incumbents, right? So Cass Sunstein gets a whole lot of citations. And if you talk about something in a particular field, you have to talk about Cass Sunstein, or you have to talk about Charles Freed, or you have to talk about like, you know, Plagiarism is about protecting the rights of incumbents to claim ownership of particular ideas, right? And to the extent that we're concerned that the incumbents are disproportionately white and male, right? That means that plagiarism rules are actually just bolstering the... you know, property interests of incumbents in their scholarly position. So, I mean, in a lot of respects, I see that as being actually kind of increasing the inequity rather than the other way around, right? If I wanted to cite to someone, right? Why, you know, why am I obligated to the person to cite to the person who said it first? Why can't I cite to the woman who said it better or the black person who said it better, right? Like who gets to own, right? the idea, right? And I think our existing plagiarism norms do that very, very poorly. For another thing, I think a lot of what people actually in practice, and this is kind of taken from experience, I think a lot of what people actually are most frustrated and irritated by is not violations of plagiarism norms, but violations of academic confidence, right? So the primary and most kind of, I think, compelling and unfortunate stories that I've heard is about people disclosing ideas, or even worse, disclosing empirical or historical research to someone who was their superior or supervisor, and having that other person then use that idea or, again, even worse, use that research without crediting it to the person who disclosed it. For me, that's not a plagiarism issue, though. That's a confidence issue. Right. It's more like I like the character is more like a trade secret. I think that's
SPEAKER_01:right. It's to me, it's not a plagiarism issue because attributing it would not, in fact, get rid of the wrong. Right. The wrong is taking the information that was given in confidence for another purpose.
SPEAKER_00:Violating the person who disclosed to you, understanding that they were doing that. You
SPEAKER_01:know, that you wouldn't do that. Right.
SPEAKER_00:We've all internalized these plagiarism norms and the idea of ownership. Well,
SPEAKER_01:apparently some people
SPEAKER_00:haven't. Right. But I mean, I think a lot of the reason that people feel wronged is that they feel like they own something without questioning to themselves whether they should own it in in the first place.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Right. So you can't actually it's hard to blame people then for saying owed me this. You should have attributed to me. Now, you brought up I'm shocked. I didn't think of when I read your papers. I did not think about the citation. Right. ranking and counting and the connection between attribution and anti-plagiarism. That is fascinating because we know women and minorities are less represented in all of those rankings. People point it out every time they come out. Yeah,
SPEAKER_00:yeah, yeah. Well, no, and like, again, like, and I don't like to spell things out sometimes because I want people to sort of come to conclusions on their own. But like one of the reasons that I, like, you know, I did this paper a while ago, plagiarize, this paper, right? Where the premise was I'm authorizing you to plagiarize, right? So on a kind of surface level, that's about like, can I do that? And if I can't do that, which I think socially and institutionally, I can't do that. Why can't I do that? Like, and what does that tell us about the nature of institutional concepts and enforcement of plagiarism? But it's also to kind of I want to get at this, like how transgressive I hope and believe it is to say, I don't want you to cite me.
SPEAKER_01:Has anybody taken you up on your offer? Has anybody plagiarized that paper yet?
SPEAKER_00:Unfortunately, well, I mean, like the thing is people are like this most recent thing I did, like I tried to really actually, like I did my best to play with that idea. Again, the point is People are so reluctant to do like, everyone will play with the idea, but then they'll attribute things anyway. And like, and you know, that's what I love about it is like, it's how uncomfortable it makes people to think about the idea of copying without attribution, which shouldn't be so scary. Like, why is that a big deal? It doesn't matter. We do it all the time in other contexts. and we don't think twice about it, right? Why in this context, you know, why should this literary genre be different from any other literary genre, as it were, right? Well,
SPEAKER_01:so is it that different from other, because this is the genre I know, right? And so I don't have many comparison points. And to me, again, given that what we care about is ideas and originality, and I take your point that there is in fact no such thing as a truly original idea. There Of course, there's not. But hopefully, there are shades of adding on to the prior body of work that we're sort of supposed to be contributing to and that others are judging us on. And so, given that that's our goal, it seems like it doesn't seem like the wrong norm to me for our goals. Whether people enforce it in the wrong way and in the wrong circumstances is a different question. That may be true. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I guess in a bigger picture context, I'd say, though, like, do we really care about novelty? And like, like, as I said earlier, right, legal scholarship is the most conventional literary genre I can possibly think of. And when we talk about something new, what we talk about is what we're interested in, we sort of value institutionally are these kinds of incredibly, like small, like, incremental like shifts to kind of the background principles. Like, I mean, like everyone knows, like when you, when you like the overwhelming majority of law review articles, if you read the abstract, you know exactly what the article is going to say. Right. And everything of substance in the article is going to show up in the last three pages after like an interminable lit review where you cite to every other person who you want to notice your article. Right. And explain what they've done in the past. And then at the very end, you add some additional new fill up of it's very scholastic. So
SPEAKER_01:I don't
SPEAKER_00:think this is
SPEAKER_01:unique to legal scholarship, though, except for the long literature review that has to pre- because we're writing for law students at some level, right? Scholarship by its nature, almost all of it, I think is and probably should be small incremental contribution. Honestly, there's been a lot of talk in other fields about the replication crisis, and many people attribute that, at least part of the problem, to a desire to have big counterintuitive findings that are appealing and that people are like, wow, look at this, right? And that if we would just focus on what most good scholarship is likely to be in any field, and that's true whether it's doctrinal or empirical or whatever, it's probably going to be, in most cases, it's a small shift. These people found this using this data. We used a much larger data set spanning a larger time period. We found a similar result. That's what most of it is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and I agree with you. I mean, I fundamentally agree with you. My point is not that we shouldn't be doing that. My point is that we should accept that that's what we're doing and think about how we can do it better and more efficiently.
SPEAKER_01:That part we do agree on. It would be better. I think we would all be better off if we stopped trying to claim that we were doing something that was big and new and had never been done before. When not only is that likely to be not true, but it's most of the time it's not good if nobody thought of this before, because it might be
SPEAKER_00:dumb. One thing you may have noticed is like I never in my work claim that I'm doing anything new.
SPEAKER_01:You do the opposite. You claim that you're not doing anything when you are.
SPEAKER_00:Right. I do it on purpose. Right. Because the whole the whole joke. Right. It's a totally bananas idea as if it's totally logical and follows. You're
SPEAKER_01:actually being too logical for me. I was hoping to have more disagreement with you. And I mean, I'm still not sold on the sort of abandoning all the plagiarism norms. But I mean, I see your I see you're making good arguments here. Like I see I see your problems with it. Right. And I sort of share some of that.
SPEAKER_00:But again, like my point is not that I'm against attribution. I'm in favor of.
SPEAKER_01:Yes.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I'm in favor of thoughtful, considered, useful, engaged attribution. Yeah. Right. Attribution for the right reasons rather than attribution out of obligation. Yeah. I just don't think that it should be a property right. I don't think it's something that you can deploy against other people to say you're obligated to recognize my ownership, my priority, my ability to compel you to pay for to what I've done in the past. I don't think ideas should work that way. I think people should be citing the things because they think it's going to be useful. I actually think we should take seriously the idea that the reason we have attribution is for readers. We should be attributing to scholars because we want to tell readers, you should look at this, but Kim, you know as well as I do. You look at those insanely long string citations and the 600 footnotes in a Larvey article. Do you seriously think that the author of that Larvey article is telling you you should go out and read all this stuff? No. That's all useless to me. Because I don't believe that you actually think that I should go look at this. And in fact, in many cases, I don't believe the person writing the article actually read any of those articles. They stuck them in there because the student law reviewer wanted to see more citations. And like, well, these are all kind of in the same area and no one objects to getting cited for things. So I may as well just drop them in the footnotes and who cares.
SPEAKER_01:One thing that sort of relates to this in some ways are citation practices, which are very different across disciplines, right? And as you've just pointed out, citations are cheap in our field. I mean, it's interesting that they're so valuable and important because at some level they're so cheap, you can include 8 million of them. In fact, you're almost required to every law review article and nobody's
SPEAKER_00:checking. Very strategic, right? Your placement will improve the more citations you put in.
SPEAKER_01:Well, then there's no system that's going to say, why did you cite this person instead of the person that developed it? There's nobody that's going to do that for you. They're just kind of, as you say, why not put more of them in there? It'll make the editors happy and it'll make the people who are cited happy. So why not put in more of them? And that's very different, I think, from the citation practice in other disciplines. right in those other journals. I mean, often the reaction is, didn't you say anything original in here? Because there's just like there's a citation for everything. And maybe the answer is no, but nothing that's less original than the other stuff they're publishing in there, quite frankly. It's just a different citation practice.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and again, my point is not that there's anything wrong with attribution, if there's anything wrong with citation, it's only just like, I want people to think more critically about what we're doing and why we're doing it. And like, and I feel like the way to do that is to like throw a bomb and let it blow up. People like start thinking about something that they wouldn't otherwise think about.
SPEAKER_01:Did you know my friend and former colleague, Keith Aoki, he's passed away now, but I don't know if you, I mean, whenever I think of bomb throwers, I just always think of Keith. I mean, he was a self-described bomb thrower.
SPEAKER_00:I know of him. I unfortunately never met him.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he was a wonderful person. I think that you would have liked him and vice versa. I've
SPEAKER_00:heard wonderful things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. All of them true. He was a wonderful person. Let's talk about the trilogy, because that was so funny. You paid these paper mills, right? Is that the proper name for them? Right. To write papers for you, arguing against plagiarism norms, all of which returned to paper, except for the word salad paper. But the other two, that actually said something actually returned a paper to you saying that plagiarism was bad.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I found especially delicious, right? Because it's an intentionally plagiarized paper arguing that plagiarism is a bad thing to do.
SPEAKER_01:Which is both... ironic, but also completely, in hindsight, predictable at the same time, given, I mean, let's assume this is not a very sophisticated operation, right? It's like, I want a paper about X. Well, what is most likely that you would want a paper about plagiarism to say that is bad? Because that's what most people say, right? So that's what they did. Yeah, yeah. It's
SPEAKER_00:universally, right? I mean, like, it's actually really hard to kind of plagiarize an argument against plagiarism because people have internalized more.
SPEAKER_01:Well, so that's another reason it was predictable then. It would have been more work.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, way more work. And I also think that like what you were saying, on some level, to the extent that the paper mill got the request, I can only assume that they were like, well, they couldn't have meant that. They must have meant this other thing.
SPEAKER_02:They
SPEAKER_00:didn't understand what they were asking for. Therefore, this is what were going to provide them. But yeah, I mean, it was, that was just, I mean, I did the initial one and put it out there and then I just started seeing all these more of them. And I figured, well, I like three, three is a good number for things. So trilogy is kind of fun. So I figured I'd do a couple extras and see what different alternatives you might end up with. But then eventually I felt compelled to do it myself, you know, so I produced my own, my own plagiarism essay. Right. arguing against plagiarism norms, but I'll tell you, it was like an incredible amount of work to do. To
SPEAKER_01:do it.
SPEAKER_00:So much, so much harder to plagiarize
SPEAKER_01:than to just write something. I don't know much about AI. Seemingly every other person is an expert now in this and I am, I am not. But, The word salad paper made me think they'll improve on that. You know, maybe you will get your way just because it's going to become easier to do high-level quality plagiarism as time goes on.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I mean, I think we're already seeing it in other areas. And like, you know, you may have seen like lately, like the DALI image generator software. And I've noticed a lot of... people who kind of fancy themselves artists getting very upset about that and being like, oh, it's, you know, stealing from us to create this data set that it then uses to generate more images. And I just, I'm always amused by this kind of landlord mentality, right? What I want to say to these people is like, look, what this is really showing you is just how formula driven and conventional most of what we call art really is. And this is true across, Human disciplines. I mean, and I don't, I don't mean, I don't mean that as a criticism. No, no. I just mean it as an observation in the sense that we have really strong incentives to produce what people want to consume and really strong disincentives to produce food. what people don't want to consume and what people want to consume is something familiar and conventional. So the overwhelming incentive is to be very, very similar to everything that came before, but just a little bit different in a way that will make people interested in it. Sounds a lot like scholarship, right? Like you don't want to be too different because if you're too different, people won't get it and they won't know what to do with it and they won't know where to put it and it won't make sense to them. You want to be very similar, but just a little bit different. So it's sort of like exciting and new and novel, but not too novel, right? Like, look, and this is my analogy, right? I say copyright is for porn, right? Copyright is for what ownership is for what is socially valuable because people want to consume it, right? Because there's demand for it. Just huge amount of demand for whatever is satisfying people's sort of desires to consume, right? Art is a consumption good that people don't understand.
SPEAKER_01:It's funny. I have heard a very similar story told about fashion. But I think you're right. It's just human nature. Who knows? I probably saw this in like some Devil Wears Prada movie or some such thing. Like the industry depends on making people buy new stuff. So like, so it has to be a change from the prior season. But at the same time, people don't like to change and they don't want to be out there wearing something that's weird. And people are like, what is that? It has to be just the right amount of change to make people buy something new and get rid of all their old stuff. But it can't be such a change that it scares people away. And we're doing the same thing, right? It makes it hard when you haven't new paper and you're presenting it and it's like, okay, everybody hated that. I have to figure out whether they hate it because it's bad or they hate it because I'm actually saying something that's true, that pressing buttons that should be pressed. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I'm like, look, I understand that. And I see this as a participant in the kind of legal education economy. If I were more strategic, I would write more normal papers on some level. Because that would benefit me. It wouldn't piss people off. It's not that hard to do. It's very straightforward. You can just pump this stuff out and it's no big deal. It's also boring. I didn't take this job because I wanted to do boring stuff. I took the job because it was like, oh, they let me do whatever I want. I know. I'm like, I'm going to take them with their word, right? Say I have academic freedom. Great. I'm going to take it. I'm going to use that to the fucking max, you know? And we
SPEAKER_01:have much more academic freedom in some ways, at least really. We have an enormous amount of freedom to do whatever we want, right? Oh, I'm bored with corporate law now. I'm going to talk about selling babies, you know, like who's going to stop you?
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Absolutely. But then on another level, right? Like I put my work out there. There's an awful lot of people in our academic community who will look at it and be like, this isn't even scholarship. Like, what the hell is this? And I'm like, look, the whole thing is part of a project, right? I'm trying to make a point and I'm making it in these kind of targeted ways, right? And I want people to talk. I mean, it was a joke for me. It was like, you know, when I got tenured, I asked some of my colleagues, I was like, well, okay, now that I'm tenured, what are the kind of expectations of a tenured professor? What am I supposed to do going forward to justify promotion and to satisfy expectations? Like, well, you should write a lot of papers and you should get national attention. I was like, hold my beer. I can do that. And then they're like, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_01:We didn't mean it that way. That's funny. Okay. So here's something I'm going to ask you, unless you want to tell me something more about the papers. I want to ask you about getting attention and about the use of social media, because you've been really great at that. And people seem to be of two minds about this, right? Like some people are like, it's the greatest thing ever. I get lots of attention that I wouldn't otherwise get. And then Some other people have exact, you know, they're like Twitter is a cesspool. I've never thought more highly of a person after reading their tweets than I did before. There's nothing to be gained from it. I assume you're going to come out in favor since you are an active user of social media. What do you think about this other view?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, I get it, but I think it really depends on... Look, the way I would put it is I feel like Twitter made me a better person because it made me think more consciously about what I was saying and why I was saying it.
SPEAKER_02:And
SPEAKER_00:it encouraged me to listen more. And I feel like podcasting was the same way. I started interviewing people because I want to learn from them. There's a lot of smart people out there with a lot of interesting ideas. I don't know what they know. And forcing myself to read people's work and talk to them about it and listen to them and learn from them. Yeah. Was a really kind of beneficial project for me. And it helped me be like, not only did I learn more in the sense of knowing more, but I also kind of learned to be a better listener and kind of think a little bit more self-consciously and deliberately about what, and I feel like, you know, Twitter is kind of the same way. It's like, you know, I think it's really easy for a lot of us to think very highly about of ourselves and our own opinions. And I think Twitter can be very humbling in that respect because any yo-yo can say you're a mora. Make you look bad, yeah. Yeah, or make you look bad and make you look like a tool or whatever, right? And I think that like a little bit of humility is good for people in our position, you know? And so for me, I feel like, and the reality is I, you know, I feel like I go onto Twitter to learn things. Every time I start a new project, I'm out there trying to figure out what other people are saying and what people's actually... This has been a big thing for me, for example. In a lot of the work I've been doing over the last year and a half or so, writing about blockchain and the NFT market in particular, I think my big angle as a scholar has been serious engagement with people participating in that community and learning from them and how they understand what they're doing and why they're doing it and what it means to them and kind of kind of being open-minded about it rather than, I think the tendency for a lot of law professors and a lot of lawyers is to look at the world in very schematic terms and in terms that we already understand. So to say like, okay, I have a set of boxes that I put things in. And every time I look out at the world, I'm going to find that thing and then put it in the most familiar box. And then I don't think about it anymore because now I understand it. And I'm like, I don't want to have any boxes, right? I just want to like look at the world and try to understand it on its own terms. And I feel like Twitter has been really good for me in that respect because a lot of people with a lot of really diverse viewpoints who all have something to say, if you're willing to like sit and listen. No, this is great. I totally find conversation. This was
SPEAKER_01:fun hearing you talk about it. I have a better sense of where you're coming from. I
SPEAKER_00:mean, I think that the difficulty for me about a lot of this is like, I don't intend anything. I, a lot of what I write to be taken literally, it's like a provocation and a metaphor. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Right.
SPEAKER_00:And so I want people to not agree with it because I'm not actually saying what I think. And I think that that's another transgression of scholarly norms. You're supposed to say what you actually think, but I actually feel like that's very limiting. Like in other contexts, we're allowed to experiment with... different modes of rhetoric, with different ways of expressing ideas, with different way of communicating ideas. And I just want people to think of scholarship, of legal scholarship in particular, as a literary medium and how you can make that literary medium more powerful.
SPEAKER_01:Excellent. Thank you so much for doing this. This was fun. My pleasure. I'm a big fan, as you know. And likewise. So I'm glad we got to do this. All right. Safe travels. Yep. Bye-bye.
UNKNOWN:Bye.
