Commentary on Carroll Seron's Presidential Address: Embrace Disciplinarity and Talk across It

Law and Society Review, Vol. 50(1), p. 34-39, 2016

Posted: 19 Apr 2017

See all articles by Rebecca L. Sandefur

Rebecca L. Sandefur

Arizona State University; American Bar Foundation

Date Written: 2016

Abstract

President Seron calls on the field to re-engage with the worlds of policy and practice, an engagement that she sees as a return to founding principles of the Association. She calls on us to take up public responsibilities as scholarly experts. She argues that we ought to do this because we can and because we should: we can because we have tools and knowledge, and we should because the absence of our contributions leads to mistakes and missed opportunities that make our communities worse-off than they would be otherwise. A third reason is that many of us are able to do what we do as scholars because of public investment in us somewhere along the line in our careers — whether in the form of grant money to fund our research, salaries to fund our positions, or direct and indirect public investment in the infrastructure of our work or our training. Part of our collective public obligation — because we can, because we should, and because we owe a debt — is to draw on our expertise to contribute to solving the challenges of our day.

President Seron argues that, while “[l]aw and regulations may have little prospect of undoing the root causes of economic, racial ethnic or gender inequalities in the contemporary politics of the U.S., or beyond... there is a lot of room for pragmatic relief...”. As she acknowledges, there is the ever-present the pull of the policy audience (Sarat and Silbey 1988; see also Gould and Barclay 2012; Sarat 1985). Engineers, both physical and social, famously look for the solution inside the problem. In fact, however, better solutions sometimes may be found by looking outside the problem, thinking more broadly about the system or context. When pulled toward the policy audience, we face a temptation to let policy makers or other administrators of the status quo define the questions of cloistered research (Albiston and Sandefur 2013). When we take this path, we exchange our intellectual autonomy for a ready audience, and in so doing hobble our potential contributions.

Another challenge is the lure of solutions, often disguised as values, in search of problems. Here, we can become so enamored of our own tool, whether it is a service program or a constitutional right or a theoretical paradigm, that our research celebrates the tool at the expense of lost connection to the real-world problems that we claim we are trying to solve. Yet, we do not notice this loss because the tool looks to us like a good in itself, when in fact it is a means to an end. Meeting these challenges will require us to take two actions that pull in different directions: embracing disciplinarity and talking across it.

Suggested Citation

Sandefur, Rebecca L., Commentary on Carroll Seron's Presidential Address: Embrace Disciplinarity and Talk across It (2016). Law and Society Review, Vol. 50(1), p. 34-39, 2016, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2949018

Rebecca L. Sandefur (Contact Author)

Arizona State University ( email )

Tempe, AZ 85287
United States

American Bar Foundation ( email )

750 N. Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, IL 60611
United States

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