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July 9, 2007
Of Foxes and Hedgehogs
I posted a reply which awaits moderation and hasn't appeared yet. But in a nutshell, my answer was this: it depends on your goals in life. If what you're looking to do is do be noticed -- to be deemed a new "player" in your "field" -- then the hedgehog strategy is the way to go. I don't think academics really know what to do with foxes, unless they are extraordinarily good. (I'm thinking of people like Ian Ayres and Mitu Gulati and Jerry Kang here.)
It's also worth noting, I think, that factors other than fox-vs.-hedgehog can be quite important in the trajectory of an academic's career and reputation. I take myself as an example: I have had two distinct hedgehog phases. In my first 4 years in academia, I (without any reflection on the matter) went the hedgehog route in the area of constitutional criminal procedure, writing a couple of articles that placed really well (Yale Law Journal and Harvard Law Review), developing a rigorous analytical angle on criminal juries through an appellate lens. (The articles are described here and here.)
Then, all of a sudden, I shed the hedgehog fur and went all "fox" on everybody, veering to work on the legal history of the Japanese American internment and more generally on questions of civil liberties and national security in wartime. Though nobody has ever told me this, I'm quite sure that I left the crim pro folks scratching their heads, wondering where the hell I had gone just as I was making a name for myself.
In the years since that shift, I've resumed the hedgehog life in the new area. But this has posed challenges of its own: I'm a person doing what might be characterized as ethnic legal history about an ethnicity that is not my own. (This would be just one of several possible characterizations, but it is perhaps the most obvious one.) So this too is, I think, a bit confusing to people, and may leave people in my "new" area (I place "new" in quotation marks because I've been doing it for more than 10 years now) scratching their heads a little bit about who I am and why I do what I do.
So I think these questions of career development and focus are rather complex. The "fox-vs-hedgehog" dichotomy is a very important distinction, but it's just one of (at least) several.
Great question that Belle has raised. My comments are still broken, but if you email me (isthatlegal - "at" sign - bellsouth - dot - net), I'll update this post with your comments.
Posted by Eric at July 9, 2007 11:36 AM