Motivation

I’m going to agree with Jason on the benefits of thinking a bit more about the table’s organization, and in particular about “additional levers.” I won’t repeat what he’s said, but I’ll add that the table itself would benefit from a small, mostly cosmetic change: I think the categories ought to be included. As it is, the table is literally a list of 13 things. It’s easy for the reader’s eyes to glaze over at such a list, which as first presented does not appear to have any particular order to it. It’s also a much less useful resource for readers who return to it after a few months, or for those who just want to photocopy that page and put it in a file or something.

On a totally unrelated note, these two pieces make me wonder about the challenge of trying to write a piece of interdisciplinary scholarship. What distinguishes good interdisciplinary legal scholarship? Whatever the answer to this question might be, I get the visceral sense that these two pieces are less about the law than, say, the Kahan piece we read early on. Does that make a difference? When we are writing our own application papers, what should our aspirations be? Should we endeavor to 1) move the motivation story forward, with a focus on law, 2) introduce the motivation literature to a body of law that hasn’t seen it, 3) use the motivation story to develop a new approach to a legal problem, or 4) something else altogether?

Anyway, this string of questions is not meant to be rhetorical. I hope we have the chance to think about answers, if only through discussing our own application papers.