Reading Poetry, Writing Legal History

     Writing is always a fraught process. It can be especially so during a pandemic. In 2020 and early 2021, when I was completing revisions to my book, I found I needed something to bring structure to my days and weeks. But I also needed liberation from the four walls of my house and the seemingly endless rinse-and-repeat cycle of pandemic life. I needed fresh perspective on material I'd been working on for years; I needed to be inspired.

    I started to begin each day by reading poetry. Theodore Roethke reminded me to pay attention to the living things outside my window, and thereby rooted me in time and in the seasons. Thus I noticed when I heard the first mourning dove of the year (in 2021, March 3rd; this year, March 10th). As Adrienne Rich writes in "A Walk by the Charles," "What lends us anchor but the mutable?" Her words were often on my mind as I worked to draw out the larger themes of my argument, without losing sight of the details specific to eighteenth-century Massachusetts.

    Some verse was a little too evocative of the here and now. Although originally written about a different time and place, Kipling's lines about "the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain" and "the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died" were a little too on the nose in early 2020 ("Mesopotamia 1917"). This kind of orientation to daily life did not encourage constructive reflection.

    Others, though, invited me to slow down, pay attention, and absorb their offerings. Poets such as e.e. cummings and W.S. Graham and Derek Walcott demanded attention to their neologisms: "mud-luscious," "puddle-wonderful," and "outfloats"; "saltcut," "strewn-silver," and "sparse-powdered." Walcott justly asserted that "when I write/this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt." When powering through thousands of prosecutions, sometimes it's easy to skim for keywords and dismiss entire phrases as mere legal boilerplate. The practice of reading poetry helped me return to the sources with my ears newly primed for those phrases soaked in salt.

    And what of writing? Did the poetry inspire better prose? My colleague Bob Vivian, a poet and writer, thinks it can; he has described reading poetry before writing "like taking a flame from another person and coaxing into one's own." Bob's beautiful metaphor obscures the fact that igniting the first person's flame might have required several frustrating hours of rubbing sticks together.  But over the long pandemic winter, I took heart from cummings, who assures us, "--whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,/it's they shall cry hello to the spring." And, also, from Scottish poet Edwin Morgan's rollicking tribute to "Sir James Murray" (creator of the Oxford English Dictionary), so stuffed with Scots words you'd swear it was a Robbie Burns poem, a reminder that language is supposed to be fun: "To work, to work! To words!"

--Kristin A. Olbertson

The Fowl Affair, or How I Temporarily Swore off Puns

I once wrote about a chicken that refused to die and called the article “The Fowl Affair.” Not everyone was amused, and I was told to go with a different title by one of the editors. I was attached to the title because the idea was hatched in a graduate class years before publication. The professor who taught the class neither encouraged nor discouraged it which I took as tacit approval though he did warn me not to present the paper at lunchtime talks. The title had been a constant companion through my postdoctoral years as I drafted and revised the article so I definitely considered digging my heels in. The article won a prize from the journal and I acquiesced.

    Although common in journalism and marketing, puns are not without controversy in academic publishing. Of course, there is such a thing as going too far. The main criticism of puns in scholarly work is that they are clever but more often than not, seldom move beyond self-congratulations. Anti-punsters believe they rarely illuminate anything or push the conversation forward although as fortuitous homonyms, they are hardly any different than metaphors which academics have embraced wholeheartedly as heuristic devices. Humor in puns make people cringe and groan, irritated at the distraction or even, perceived deflection. Droll at best, puns are indeed lesser than tropes which could be explored at length as turns of phrases. By contrast, puns tend to end conversation because to explain them would destroy the fun in them. Because of this, I myself refrain from puns in my book although one of my manuscript reviewers mentioned (in a positive light so likely, a lover of puns) that there were indeed puns so I might be a natural punster after all.

Puns are delightful. They are whimsical and grant a reprieve from the serious dreariness of scholarly work at times. A pun is as an expression that achieves emphasis or humour by contriving an ambiguity, two distinct meanings being suggested either by the same word or by two similar-sounding words, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Because legal history often addresses topical issues with urgency and immediacy, they could add much-needed levity to our writing. Law review articles are already notorious for being punny – here’s a sample list of delicious titles. My personal favorite is the title of a book by Rebecca J.H. Woods The Herds Shot Around the World: Native Breeds and The British Empire, 1800-1900 (2017).

Puns are supposedly untranslatable although ironically people revel in multilingual puns all the time taking advantage of similar-sounding words in many languages simultaneously. The two languages I am learning at the moment, Persian and Mandarin Chinese, are particularly full of puns. Even within one language, puns are by their very nature interdisciplinary since they exist in several domains at the same time because they layer meaning, humor and irony in a single or few words. Puns suggest evidence and expression of a hidden connection—between mind and material, ideas and things, knowing and nomenclature, and who would not want to be sensitized to these connections. The knowing recognition we get from our audience is very satisfying too and bonds us deeper with one another. I have since returned to puns as my previous post attests.

--Nurfadzilah Yahaya

After the First Book: Community, Routine, Project Lifecycle

This will be my last post in my time guest-blogging here this month. In my prior posts I’ve talked about how it felt to write my dissertation and my book and about the practical organization of the work. Now I want to talk a little about life after the book. Obviously this is a new stage (I have a book now! Cool! … now what?!) but I didn’t see this stage coming. I’ve tended to see major milestones as stopping points, I think because it’s been so much work and felt so consequential to hit those marks, that I’ve tended to forget that after the milestone there’s more to do. I’ve started to think about this new stage, its challenges, and my efforts at navigating those challenges, in terms of project lifecycle, daily routine, and intellectual community.

Heavy Books, Compulsory Positivity, and Post-Dissertation Depression

A friend who is a comedy writer once asked me what my book was about. I explained that it was about people getting hurt at their jobs and what I see as the limits of legal responses to those injuries. He replied “that’s really dark. It’s probably not good for you to spend so much time in that headspace.” I said “oh it’s fine, it’s based on my dissertation, I’ve been thinking about this stuff for about a decade.” He responded, “you realize that’s not reassuring, right?” I didn’t at first.

I finished the heavy lifting thinking-wise on my book some time in the spring or summer of 2019, if memory serves. I did a lot of line-edits and other hard work afterward but the ideas didn’t change. I finished that work some time in the fall of 2019. When the COVID-19 pandemic really took off, I felt like I had been living with mass death for a very long time already and was emotionally exhausted. I’m sure I can’t be the only person feeling this way right now and I don’t mean to claim that the pandemic is extra hard for me. I’m just saying that I wonder if I was already depleted somewhat when the pandemic started. I’ve seen other scholars talking about this on social media but I haven’t kept notes on that; I now wish I had.

How I went from dissertation to book: escaping blank pages, part 2

I talked in my last post about how I went over my dissertation and pulled bits out that I identified as containing the seeds of the book I wanted to write, and how I catalogued those bits. In what follows I’m going to talk about how I went from having basically an organized collection of remnants from my dissertation to really beginning my book.

Once I had gone through all of the raw material the way I described last time, I called the result a skeleton file. It was basically a heavily annotated outline including large amounts of notes and fragments of text. The next step I took was to print the skeleton file and read over it to see if I put everything in the right place - some of the notes under section 2 of the chapter plan might really be better under section 4, say. Those discoveries also sometimes helped me see that I needed to restructure the plan of the chapter a little. In reviewing the skeleton I also sometimes realized there were sections for which I needed to do further reading and research, and that I might need a new section sometimes. All of this gave me more tasks for my to-do list, but fairly well-defined and finite ones. I set about filling in those sections with notes on primary and secondary sources.

How I went from dissertation to book: escaping blank pages, part 1

I shy away from blank pages as a writer - all that empty space, and me with nothing to say…! Blank pages are harder to face the more the filled pages will eventually be judged, such as when I wrote my book proposal, and the greater the number of blank pages it feels like there are, as when I first sat down thinking “I’m going to start my book now.” Last time I mentioned that I’ve looked for ways to, in effect, make the page less blank. I’ve also looked for ways to make it feel like I have fewer blank pages in front of me, by breaking big projects up into lots of small tasks. In what follows I want to tell you how I did this with my article, my book proposal, and the process of moving from dissertation to book.

Creating Context: Sociality vs Bad Feelings, part II

I wrote in my last post about needing intellectual community. As I mentioned at the end of that post, one important source of intellectual community in my writing life has been the writing group I co-convene at Drake where I work. In what follows, I’m going to talk a little about our writing group. As I’ll discuss a little below, ASLH-provided intellectual community has been very important to me as well. That reflects a real strength of legal history as a subfield, in my view. I also get into how how I’ve organized my own writing life - mostly focusing on what I try for in my daily(ish) writing routine, in order to keep active as a scholar given everything else I have on my plate. I want to stress again that I don’t intend any of this prescriptively. If you haven’t tried what I’ve tried, you might and see what happens, but your mileage may vary. Likewise, if you’re doing things as a writer that I’m not, please share that so I can try it out.

As I mentioned, I co-facilitate and co-organize a campus writing group with my colleague, Professor En Li. Our writing group meets approximately monthly during the semester. At each meeting we write for about half an hour together, first thing. The first meeting of the semester is dedicated to briefly introducing the plan for the writing group, then involves check-ins and getting to know each other. Everyone introduces themselves and then we talk about how the last semester or “break” between semesters went (do we ever really get breaks?) in terms of writing, and what our plans, goals, and anticipated challenges are for the current semester or summer. In the remaining meetings, after a short session spent writing quietly and a short session for check-in and logistical questions (such as “how do I approach editors to ask if I can send them my book proposal?”) and writing-life management (“how do you manage to get work done? How do you organize your writing week?”) the rest of the time is dedicated to one or two people workshopping work-in-progress. (If anyone's interested in trying to set up a writing group, we found Jensen's advice in her book helpful. Some of that advice is in this Chronicle essay. We differ from Jensen, though, in our emphasis on work-in-progress workshopping.)

Creating Context: Sociality vs Bad Feelings, part I.

I wrote in my last post about the writing process I used as I worked my way out of a nasty bout of writers’ block. Those individual techniques were very helpful to me, but equally important was the collective setting in which I did the work. In this post, I talk a little about the writing groups I was in, and the mutual writing support I was part of, with friends and colleagues while in graduate school. I then talk about some of the challenges I've had in maintaining a writing practice after finishing graduate school.

I wrote a great deal of my dissertation next to or across a table from several friends and people who I became friends with because we worked near each other that way. I can’t remember exactly how and when it started but I remember clearly asking another grad student friend something like “uhhhh are you working this week and if so can I come and work in your vicinity while you work, please?” By that point I was already part of a private workshop group with some other friends, and there were a lot of other workshops offering opportunities to get feedback on work and to read others’ work. I enjoyed the workshopping and got a great deal out of it, in terms of my own work. (For instance: at one point, my friend and colleague Joe Haker said to me something like “you often reference the part of Rediker’s Slave Ship book where he talks about the violence of abstraction and that’s because you think there are real social practices of abstraction that happen and which are violent.” It shaped my dissertation immensely and my book too.) I also benefited immensely from reading others’ work. I eventually figured out, though, that I lacked something in my writing life that I very much needed: some kind of writing support. I didn’t know what that lack was, I just felt scared and was procrastinating a lot and needed help to even start typing. That help was upstream, so to speak, from intellectual engagement with the content of my writing. I wasn’t sure what that help would look like but I hoped that maybe with another person nearby I would feel merely afraid, instead of feeling an immobilizing terror. It turns out I was right. Working near someone else turned the volume knob on my negative writing emotions down to a level where I could work.

Organizing Myself: Process vs Bad Feelings, part 2

In my last post I wrote about getting writer’s block while in graduate school, after having written a rough draft of the dissertation. This post is the second half of the story, in which I discuss beginning to work again. First I talk about how I dealt with writer’s block specifically, then I turn to how I set about doing the actual revisions on my dissertation. That revision process also involved some aspects of emotional self-regulation that helped me not fall back into writer's block.

Amid my dissertation malaise I really turned a corner when I finally admitted writing felt impossible - I truly did not believe I could finish the dissertation - and that I hated doing it. This was a hard thing to say out loud. Quitting was not an option, I was the only income and source of insurance for my family, and I’d gone to grad school in part to escape years of employment insecurity, so the thought of trying to figure out how to do anything else was terrifying as well. (As I type this I am aware that I was naive about the state of the academic job market when I went to grad school in 2005 or so. I am also aware that the market is even worse now than it was when I finally graduated in 2014. Graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty have been massively failed in multiple ways by a lot of powerful people and institutions.)

Having admitted that writing the dissertation felt impossible but that I still had to write it somehow, my job became figuring out how to spend my time doing something I hated and that I didn’t believe I could succeed at. In effect I had to find a way to make my putting in the time to do the work not contingent upon how I felt about doing the work. I still didn’t believe I could finish the dissertation, but I knew that the only shot I had at finishing was to spend a lot of time writing.

Organizing Myself: Writing Process vs Bad Feelings (part 1 of 2)

One email, six excruciating months. “Dear Nate, We were excited to read the draft of your dissertation. What a great project! We’ve attached a copy with comments from both of us and look forward to seeing where it goes from here.” My co-advisors sent me that around July 2013. (Full transparency: this is a recreation on my part, I don’t remember the exact words and I am no longer able to locate that email. On the details my memory is foggy - an effect, I am sure, inflicted by the job market, multiple moves, having multiple young kids, and the demands of the job - but I recall the heart of the experience keenly.)

Holdren’s First Post -- My book and my plans for future posts

I want to thank the editors of the Legal History Blog for having me as a guest blogger. It’s an honor and I’m delighted to have my words on here. As Professor Tani mentioned in her introduction, I recently published a book and I want to tell you about it.

My book is called Injury Impoverished: Workplace Accidents, Capitalism, and Law in the Progressive Era. It's my first book and is based on my dissertation. I think of the book as a study in the intellectual life of governance - how power relationships are conceptualized, mostly by powerful people, and what concepts are implied within power relationships, whether or not anyone actually thought them explicitly. In my view, inquiry is enriched by emphasis on both of these facets, the actual thoughts of people and the implicit logics enacted within institutional practices. I’m aware that this all sounds pretty abstract. In addition to talking about abstract matters, I also tried to foreground the real human beings who died, suffered, and lived despite all the harms to which working-class people are subjected. In my view, that dying and suffering was (and still is) largely organized by the kinds of abstractions I talk about in the book.

Don't Fear the Index

How many times have you been frustrated by a bad index in someone else’s book? You go back to a great secondary source and spend a frustrating half-hour or more trying to find a particular point you need. Or you pick up a tome that you don’t want or need to read cover-to-cover, but you can’t find the thing you know is in there somewhere. You turn to the index only to find that the person, place, or event is not indexed. Or it is there in the index—but has fifteen undifferentiated page references, and you have to go through each one to find the thing you want.

I didn’t want to be that author—the one who treats the index as a formality—and instead decided to try to make my book index one that I would find helpful as a reader. I wound up with what I consider a good index, as well as a learning experience.

The publisher treated the index in my book as the author’s responsibility. In theory, I could have supplied an index myself, but lacking experience and know-how, I decided instead to throw money at the problem. Free-lance indexers charge somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500 for a 250-ish page academic monograph. Rather than hiring my own indexer, I chose the path of least resistance and allowed the book production contractor to subcontract a free-lance indexer, with a bill ultimately sent to me for the work. The advantage, I figured, was that the indexer would be familiar with the publisher’s production process and the indexing would be folded into that process.

What happened next was something of a mixed blessing. The production contractor sent me a draft index with a short turnaround time, on the assumption that the index was in good shape and required only a few hours of proofing and tinkering. On the positive side, the indexer did a very good job producing a long list of main headings, including certain items—often, names of individuals—that I might not have thought to include but that I was ultimately glad to include. The indexer also cited to the paragraph numbers of the page proofs, which would be converted to page numbers by the end of the production process. This was extremely useful as the paragraph cites would not be thrown off by last-minute pagination changes. I also appreciated that the indexer made a real effort to create detailed subheadings rather than simply amassing a dozen or more undifferentiated page cites for main headings like “slavery.” 

But the downside was that the subheadings needed a lot of revision. They were often worded in ways that would make little sense to specialists, or bore insufficient relation to my text, and at times they were a step above gibberish. In retrospect, I realized that it was unrealistic to expect an indexer to understand the book’s themes in sufficient detail, and to sufficiently master specialized terminology, to produce a useful, and indeed respectable, index.

I spent about 55 hours revising the index. But before gasping in fear and horror, hear me out. I found the experience worthwhile and far from tedious.

I quickly fell into a routine of doing word searches through my page proofs for all of the main index headings that were likely to need subheadings. To qualify for this treatment, the main heading had to be either an important concept or to have more than five page cites. (The latter criterion was suggested in the publisher’s indexing guide for authors.) As the author, I found it quick and easy to discern the context for the word or phrase in question and to come up with a subheading word or phrase that fit the book. The process, though highly repetitive, was absorbing and interesting, in a crossword puzzle/Sudoku kind of way.

But there was a more substantive payoff as well. The indexing process forced me to think hard about the book’s various themes and their interconnections, from the vantage point of terminology. This was different – fascinatingly so—from thinking about the book’s themes in writing the body text of the manuscript, organizing chapters, or writing chapter abstracts and jacket copy.

The most challenging aspect of the indexing process, for me, was trying to disentangle overlapping concepts that might warrant separate main index entries: for example, “race” and “slavery,” or “federal powers” and “Commerce Clause.” The key, I found, was not to disentangle them at all. Instead, I realized that I should embrace overlap and repetition, allowing myself to repeat page cites and subheadings while liberally sprinkling in “see also” references. After all, a reader might look to either “race” or “slavery” in the index’s main headings to find the discussion of “fugitive slave laws.”

The question I now have is what to do next time (hoping I have a second book in me). I can think of two options to improve on the indexing process I described above. One is to try to create the index from scratch myself, using Word or some indexing software to generate main headings. The other option is to hire the indexer to produce a list of main headings only. I would expect this to cost less money, guessing (but it is only a guess) that the subheadings take up 50% of the indexer’s time. Either way, I would plan to do the index subheadings myself.

Fifty-five hours sounds like a lot. But it is less daunting if you think about it as ten days to two weeks of steady work at the end of a long writing process. Having put your heart and soul into writing a book, you should take the time to have an extended conversation with it—which the index-writing process certainly is. Your book is worth it.

--David Schwartz

A Better Book: Development Editors

              Today’s post concerns the secret weapon of many an excellent (legal history) author, the development editor. I worked with two on my book, Almost Citizens. They were crucial to my learning curve. Without them, I would never have crafted a book that resembled the vision in my head.

              Before starting my book, I had never contemplated paying someone to help me improve my writing. Legal history is a specialized area, and I chose my words carefully to hew to what the sources supported. I worried that someone from outside the field would seek to simplify or expand my claims in ways that I would just end up reversing. The problem was that I also knew that I could benefit from fresh eyes on my writing. By the time I’d drafted a few chapters and signed with Cambridge University Press, I felt confident about my narrative structure and cast of characters. But I found it more difficult to do smaller-scale reorganizations and line edits. This was partly because I was so close to the manuscript. It was also because writing is a skill, and I had more to learn.

Despite having many generous readers, none seemed likely candidates to become writing mentors. Colleagues and reviewers grappled with my work and provided incisive comments. But that feedback almost always involved the substance of the argument rather than its tone and constituent sentences. Given the economic realities of book publishing, many publishers hardly do any editing of manuscripts in progress. I did have the good fortune to publish with American Society for Legal History’s book series (which I discuss here). Sally Gordon was my editor there, and she was a tireless and skilled reader. But she soon saw that the book and I could both gain from more editorial engagement than she could devote to a single book in her series. So she recommended that I consider a development editor.

              I had never heard the term. Perhaps because I live just down the road from Hollywood, my mind immediately went to the entertainment executives who tell show runners that their sitcoms need more dogs or a kooky sister to really draw in the millennials. But (spoiler alert!) that was not whom I was to encounter. The editors I would work with helped me produce the best possible version of my book. Sometimes, such work is called development editing. Sometimes it goes by different names.

              I sought someone who could help me make my prose sing (or at least hum occasionally) without sacrificing nuance and accuracy. Given my topic, that meant an editor who could engage legal and historical arguments, had a sense of the evidentiary norms in the field, and understood the potential audiences for the work. But finding such an editor is a bit like turning up a good contractor for a renovation; you ask around, check out samples of the person’s work, and ultimately take a leap of faith that the (intellectual) place that you lay your head will be transformed for the better.

              I had the good fortune to work with two excellent development editors. I learned of both through admired colleagues who sang the praises of having collaborated with them. The first was Grey Osterud, an accomplished academic historian. Rather than teach, she complements her research with editing colleagues’ work. I was thus confident from the outset that she knew and honored the standards of academic history. Once I had the manuscript drafted, I undertook a rewrite with Pamela Haag, an author of serious histories for broader audiences. Notably, she also has a contract with Yale University Press for a style guide for the scholar-writer that I look forward to adding to my shelf soon.

              As Grey and Pamela helped me improve the book’s prose, they were also teaching me to be a better writer. One set of lessons had to do with the difficulties of evaluating choices about organization when one is too close to the text. Because I was circulating individual chapters to colleagues for feedback, I tried to put enough at the front of each chapter to orient them. The result was bloated chapter introductions. My development editors saw the problem immediately. They worked with me to shorten the chapter introductions and have them serve more as bridges between chapters than as introductions to standalone essays. Similarly, my immersion in the particularities of the book’s events had led me to subdivide the book’s chronology into overly narrow chronological bands. As Grey and Pamela perceived, such fine distinctions muddied the broader argument rather than clarifying it. Thus, a chapter that I had written with six sections, one for each of three characters at each of two times (ABCABC), came to contain just three character-centered sections (ABC).

              Careful editing by others is a wonderful way to discover one’s own writing tics. I had been particularly blind to two. I wrote long, intricate sentences and was overly fond of metaphors. I had to learn to reduce clauses and interjections, break up sentences, and clarify which verbs and nouns went together in what ways. Similarly, I had to unmix metaphors and close them out before they ceased to clarify. The difficulty in both cases was less fixing the problems than perceiving them in the first place. Grey and Pamela sensitized me to my propensity to create these tangles, which was all I needed to start fixing them.

              Like many historians, I revel in the details and complexity of what I study. Seeing the danger, my dissertation committee co-chair Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof counseled that my job was to over-claim and that his job was to rein me in. But knowing that I should trim and sum up did not wholly cure me. My development editors urged me to go further. Curate evidence. Don’t cut one of five quotations; leave just one. Remove tangents. Lead with bold claims. Qualify them later. Or don’t. The result was much more accessible prose. Arguments rose to the surface, no longer drowned by my sea of evidence.

There is one big downside to a development editor: she costs money. How much varies by who you hire, for how long, and for what. But price tags in the thousands of dollars would be common. The best solution is to have someone else pay. My law school (USC’s Gould School of Law) is extremely generous in its support for junior scholars’ work. While schools and departments may vary substantially in what they are able to offer, it is always worth asking. Knowing that peer institutions have offered similar funding can sometimes help shake out extra funds.

Had I had to pay for my development editors entirely out of pocket, I might have balked at using them or using them so extensively. In my case, that would have been a mistake. Their services were worth far more than the cost. As an early-stage scholar, the benefits were quite large. I have many productive years left in which to benefit from what I have learned in terms of writing and argumentation. The book is stronger too. That matters because the book is my debut in legal history as a mature scholar. It was also the centerpiece of my file for tenure (which I just received--Yay!).

My biggest fear when I began working with development editors was that I would not recognize the final text of the book as my own prose. In fact, the opposite was true. By the time I began working with Grey, I largely knew what I wanted to argue, which historical actors and narratives I wanted to feature, and what evidence I wanted to rely upon. But I found it frustratingly hard to translate the book that I had in my head into words on the page. As Grey and then Pamela and I worked on the prose, the gap between it and my envisioned book narrowed considerably (albeit with some nice additions suggested by my development editors that I had not foreseen). Almost Citizens ended up being very much my book—even more so than I had at first hoped.

--Sam Erman

A Better Book: The ASLH Book Series

              Perhaps the most important decisions of my transition from dissertation to book was mine to publish with the American Society of Legal History’s book series at Cambridge University Press and theirs to have me.  In a word, the reason was: editing.  In a person, it was: Sally Gordon.  More specifically, I gained a mentor, a booster, a reader, a quarterback, and a promoter.

              From the outset, Sally shared and shaped my vision for the project. I first reached out to her about the book on the suggestion and introduction of my mentor Dan Ernst, himself a former editor of the series.  To my amazement, she read my entire dissertation with her discerning and constructive eye. She saw the same promise in the dissertation that I did. It already had characters, a narrative, and evidence that constitutional change sometimes occurred outside of courts. The promising strands it had left dangling included the place of Reconstruction in U.S. empire, mechanics and details of who drove what legal change how, the relationship between Puerto Ricans and both American Indians and mainland women and minorities, and the shadow that U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines cast over everything.

              An unexpected (but not surprising) benefit of publishing with the ASLH series is that it brings instant credibility with society members. At the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, Sally also introduced me as an up-and-coming scholar with plans to publish in the series.  Anyone who’s seen Sally in action knows that means meeting a lot of society members. I’ve always felt welcome at the annual meetings, but since then the meetings have been a sea of friendly faces.

               Joining the series also meant receiving a level of editing and mentorship that I associate with literary presses of yore, not the tight margins of modern academic publishing.  Almost Citizens was my first book, so I had no experiences identifying – much less making – many of the decisions that book writing  requires. Fortunately, as I wrote (and rewrote), Sally read (and re-read)–the book proposal, an annotated table of contents, individual chapters, and finally the full manuscript.  Every major element of the book bears her mark. Through emails, phone calls, and coffees, she pressed me to specify and “surface” my biggest claims and to open my geographic and temporal lenses wide enough to bring those claims fully into focus. We discussed what books I liked, how they were structured, what writerly voice the authors had employed, who read those volumes, and who might read mine.

Equally important, Sally was an enduring source of encouragement. She kept me optimistic and energized throughout the long and lonely endeavor that is book writing. Our conversations spanned years. During each she reminded me what I had accomplished, then identified the further progress now within reach.

As my draft chapters accumulated, Reuel Schiller joined Sally as a co-editor of the series, to its and my good fortune. Sally and Reuel were a crack pair of text massagers and arrangers. They also knew how to leverage their insights. When they saw room for improvement but lacked the time to provide detailed feedback (the series had other authors; they had day jobs–and lives), they recommended that I use development editors (a subject of an upcoming post).

Working with the series also meant that I had experienced editors in my corner as I navigated the unfamiliar, far-from-intuitive publishing process.  When I negotiated my contract, Sally knew which details mattered: commit to a number of images and ask for preapproval; ensure that the series can choose the copy editor and indexer; choose a publication deadline that can slip a month or two without endangering your tenure case.  Someone had to pay for editing, indexing, and the like. The series helped me ask my home institution for the funds by providing me evidence that peer institutions were already providing such funds to their junior faculty. When I became concerned with one or another of the press’s decisions, Sally and Reuel helped me sort out which items were worth raising in what ways. They were always willing to speak on my behalf to Cambridge, with whom they maintained a strong and cooperative relationship.

Mostly, the series steered me away from pitfalls. I never had to contemplate the disadvantages of a machine-made index because my contract let me hire the wonderful Derek Gottlieb. Where some authors tell horror stories of overseas copy editors who insert more typos than they correct, the series snagged for me the excellent Julie Hagen.

              With my book now out under the series imprint, I can add that I am happy being judged by the company I keep. Cambridge University Press’s august imprimatur makes it more likely that readers will pick up the book. The American Society for Legal History is my foremost academic home. It has also published many of the legal historians that I most admire, including the first books of several of the best up-and-coming scholars in the field.

--Sam Erman

On Scholarship and Productivity – a Farewell to the Legal History Blog and a Confession

Back in June 2018, when Mitra Sharafi invited me to be a guest blogger for a month, she mentioned, among other things, that she would love a post with tips on research productivity. I did not want to end this blogging experience without complying with her wish.  

Twenty-five years after I defended my dissertation and with some twenty-or-less years before I retire, what have I learned about research and writing? 

The first thing is that, although intuitively we tend to think that focusing on smaller things and a shorter time span would enable a greater efficiency, this is usually untrue. In my own experience, the larger and wider you look, the quicker you understand what you see. This was a lesson my driving teacher taught me when I was sixteen years old. She explained that if I looked right in front of the wheels (which was what I naturally wanted to do) I would see nothing; but that if I looked to the horizon I would see everything. I am sure she did not mean to give me a life-long advice, but her wisdom guides me (also) as I imagine, plan, or execute, new projects. 

Looking to the horizon requires, among other things, to ignore the most obvious and the most travelled route. I know Robert Frost warned us that the routes we take may not make as huge a difference as we would like to believe, but not being certain where I was going paradoxically allowed me to better listen to the archives. I listened not to what they told me about the past, but also to what they said about my research question. Was it a valid question? Should it be asked differently? How can it be divided into pieces and what should be included? At least twice the archives told me to abandon the search altogether or they suggested that the project I was pursing was of little interest. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I ended up obeying. 

Knowing when to stop was a fundamental issue. Many years ago, as an MA student, my then mentor gave me the advice that when nothing surprises me any longer, it is time to leave. I follow his recommendation religiously, even as I tremble at the thought that an amazing discovery may be waiting for me in the next bunch of papers, which I will never read. 

Efficiency at the archives is one thing; another is to overcome the first blank page of a new project. There are days in which I can write, and days that are useless. I try to come to terms with these fluctuations, knowing that there is little I can do to change them. When I get really stuck I go swimming. Swimming allows me a concentration, which I cannot otherwise obtain. 

Over the years, I learned to avoid peer review. I realize this may be an unnecessary confession, but there is nothing that I like or find useful about peer review. Peer reviewers sometimes know more than you, or as much as you do, but often they do not. Some are generous and engage with your argument, but others want to impose their ideas. I know peer review is supposed to ensure a certain quality across the board and maybe sometimes it does, but in my own experience it mostly produces leveling.  While it guarantees serious and responsible scholarship, it disrupts attempts at doing things differently. Perhaps because I was educated in Paris, as I matured in the American academic system I kept asking myself whether revered French academics such as Foucault, Derrida, or Braudel, would have ever passed a proper peer review. I am convinced they would not. Nonetheless, our scholarly world is better because of what they proposed. Their insights were transformative even if their method was too new, their facts too shaky, and their tendency to generalize too extreme. 

I also believe it is important to remember that there are many ways to think about productivity. The most obvious is to measure it by the number of books and articles. Another is by evaluating the divergence between them, and the degree by which they respond to different questions, methodologies, areas, or subjects of expertise. What kinds of linguistic and archival competence is required is another important point, as well as whether sources are available online or demand dislocation, where to, and how user-friendly are the deposits. 

Beyond all these considerations, the greatest lesson I learned is that, although we tend to think about productivity as a personal achievement, in earnest, it often depends on the individuals and institutions around us. Teaching in universities with excellent students, interesting colleagues, great libraries, and comfortable office space, facilitates things tremendously. So does having many sabbaticals, preferably, many more than the term usually implies. A supportive domestic and social environment is crucial. We often give thanks to our families and friends because of what they had endured while we did research and writing. I am thankful to them on this account, but I am mostly grateful for the conversations they facilitated. I found dialogues with my twin boys surprisingly illuminating. When they were younger, I needed to explain things simply; when older, my aim was to make them more complex. But, as I dragged them across countries and continents, I learned a new art of explaining and discovered new ways to think about what I believed I already knew. 

There is a famous saying that behind every successful man there is a great woman. Fortunately, I belong to a generation that can also affirm the contrary. I am certainly privileged to be backed by a great man. It is to him, that great man who listens, shares, discusses, assists, reads, and advises, that I dedicate this last piece.

Weekend Roundup

• Last Thursday,  the Irish Women Lawyers’ Association sponsored “Lawful Attire,” a lecture on the history of lawyers’ clothing, by Hilary O’Kelly, lecturer in visual culture at the National College of Art and Design.  Irish Legal News.

• The Scotsman's obituary of Alan Watson, "Scots-born legal scholar who wrote groundbreaking texts on Roman law." 

• We were in the library with some time to kill when our eye fell on a recent acquisition, Lachy Paterson and Angela Wanhalla’s He Reo Wāhine (Auckland University Press), “a bold work that rediscovers the lost voices of Maori women in nineteenth-century New Zealand through their own words.”  Of course, legal sources are one place where the lost voices were found, especially in connection with land sales and testamentary matters.

• Jeffrey Winn reviews Jane Sherron De Hart’s Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf), in the New York Law Journal.

• Stanford Law School’s press release on Amalia D. Kessler’s receipt of the 2018 John Phillip Reid Book Award at this year’s annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History for Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800-1877. 

• In September "the Tobin Project gathered ten scholars for the first meeting of our research inquiry on When Democracy Breaks. This project seeks to explore past cases of democratic collapse and identify the factors that led to decline, with the goal of better understanding why democracies fail and how we can sustain a robust democracy over time."  More.

• ICYMI: Francine Uenuma on The First Criminal Trial That Used Fingerprints as Evidence, in The Smithsonian.

• Medieval Digital Resources, a new site by the Medieval Academy of America, looks interesting on canon and Welsh law.

• Do you write to music or in silence? If the former: a recent Twitter thread with recommendations here. 

• This week marked the death anniversary (62nd) of B. D. Ambedkar (1891-1956), prime architect of India's Constitution and critic of the caste system. New book out on his thought and legacy here. Here is a fragment of his remarkable autobiographical piece, "Waiting for a Visa" (c.1935-6). 

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Tips on Writing for a Peer-Reviewed Journal

For almost five years now, I‘ve been the editor of Law & Social Inquiry. A peer-reviewed journal, based at the American Bar Foundation, LSI publishes sociolegal scholarship from a range of disciplines. Here are a few tips I’ve collected for anyone interested in publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, particularly a journal with an interdisciplinary profile.

Your Abstract Is More Important Than You Think

LSI regularly receives strong manuscripts with weak abstracts. First impressions are important, and the first impression you’ll make with a journal’s editors and potential reviewers come from your title and abstract.

At LSI, poor abstracts cause particular challenges. We distribute titles and abstracts to our Editorial Board and to the ABF community to solicit recommendations for peer reviewers. And when we invite a scholar to review a manuscript, we send them the abstract. A weak abstract makes it much harder for us to line up the best possible reviewers for a manuscript.

What makes a good abstract? The simplest advice is to avoid making it too broad or too narrow. A broad abstract risks coming across as arrogant or naïve. (“In this article I reassess government regulation in the twentieth century.”) A narrow abstract risks coming across as of limited interest beyond a small group of specialists. (“In this article I reassess the operation of city courts in Hartford during the 1920s.”) A good abstract explains why your topic is important and persuades the reader that you have something interesting and significant to say about that topic.

The title, abstract, and introduction should each basically do the same thing: describe the topic of the article and what you have to say about that topic.

It’s less important that an abstract be complete than that it be compelling. Weak abstracts often conscientiously describe every element of the article, but in so doing they become lifeless to-do lists. Strong abstracts capture the article rather than summarize it. The goal is to provide a coherent story about the article, one that engages the reader and persuades this reader that the article is worth reading.

Remember Your Audience I

Who is this “reader” you’re trying to engage and persuade? In the realm of peer-reviewed journals, it’s best to think of two kinds of readers: the expert and the generalist. You need to write for both.

The expert view will be reflected in your peer review reports. These are readers selected because of their expertise on the topic of your manuscript, and to appease them you need to demonstrate your knowledge, be precise in your facts, and be complete in your references to the relevant scholarship. If you’re doing quantitative analysis, your methods must be sound.

The generalist view is sometimes reflected in the reader reports, but more often the journal editors are the ones who assume this role in the review process. When making editorial decisions for LSI, I often position myself as a “general” reader of the journal—a reader, that is, who is not an expert in the field of a given manuscript, who may have no particular interest in the topic, but who nonetheless might find something interesting and valuable in this particular piece of scholarship. Assuming this position is hardly a stretch for me, since for the vast majority of articles LSI considers, this is pretty much is who I am: non-expert but curious and open to new insights.

Don’t forget about your potential generalist audience. The goal of most journal editors is to publish articles that will be read beyond a small circle of specialists.

Remember Your Audience II

The target audience for an interdisciplinary journal is different from that of a disciplinary journal.  If, for example, LSI receives a legal history submission, I’ll line up as reviewers not just historians but also scholars in other disciplines who draw on legal historical scholarship. What appeals to this kind of reader is likely different from what appeals to the legal historian. If the entire motivation for your article is to contribute to some debate among legal historians, you risk losing much of your potential audience. You need to show why non-legal historians should care about this particular legal historical debate.

The primary goal of an interdisciplinary journal is not to offer a sampling of disciplinary work; it’s to publish articles that allow and encourage people to read across disciplines. If you are submitting to one of these journals, you should keep this in mind.

Take the Author Revision Memo Seriously

In addition to the manuscript itself, the most important document that the author submits is the letter that accompanies the manuscript when it has been revised after a “revise-and-resubmit” initial decision. (Note: I don’t think I’m alone among editors in saying that cover letters that accompany the article on initial submission typically play little to no role in the selection process.) The revision memo need not be particularly lengthy or minutely detailed, but it should be generous, thoughtful, and carefully written. It’s an opportunity to emphasize the seriousness with which you approach the revision process.

The revision memo also allows you to explain to the editors and the peer reviewers why you chose not to make a suggested revision. I would rather see an author defend an authorial choice—and hopefully persuade a skeptical reviewer of the validity of that choice—than just accept all criticisms and suggested revisions because that’s what was in the reader reports. Embrace those suggestions that make your article better. But when you receive a suggestion that you believe doesn’t work for your article, respectfully say so and explain why. Use the revision memo to your advantage. It not only can improve your chances of having your article accepted, it can also allow you to publish a better article.

The Process Works. Usually.

Having watched the peer-review process from the inside, I can say that as a general matter it works. Truly excellent scholarship is identified as such and sails through the process. Strong scholarship is regularly made stronger. Manuscripts that are not accepted for publication receive reviews that combine critique with insightful and generous feedback.

Of course the peer-review process doesn’t always work. It’s far superior to the world of student-edited law reviews. And it’s generally better than a review process in which a single editor or a group of editors make all the substantive evaluations. Nonetheless, strong articles sometimes don’t get through the peer review process, while weaker ones sometimes do.

Editors of peer-reviewed journals are reminded again and again of the subjectivity of assessing scholarship. We see equally qualified reviewers arrive at diametric assessments of the quality of a particular submission. For many viable submissions—the ones that fall outside the clear “yes” or “no” category—the particular line-up of reviewers assigned to the manuscript can determine whether it’s published or not. (This has little to do with the choice of reviewers. I’m constantly surprised at the response a manuscript receives—people I think will hate a manuscript come back with a rave review; people I think will love a manuscript come back with a black ball review.) I’m pretty confident that at least some of the close cases would come out the other way if we ran the review process again.

All of this is to say that you shouldn’t get too down when the peer review process doesn’t go the right way. If the reader reports all make the same critique, then you likely have a problem you need to work on. But this is not always the case.

The peer review process provides information. More often than not, this information—the work of an overwhelmingly conscientious group of reviewers and editors—is quite valuable. But like all information, it can be flawed. It’s subject to interpretation. If your reviewers are divided, and the journal editors choose not to accept your article, then your job is to make use of the information you’ve gained. Figure out which critiques are valid and which ones are not. Then revise the manuscript and send it off to another journal.