By James Grimmelmann
Last updated December 2025
I like to help junior scholars find their footing and their voice. Here are some of the suggestions I find myself giving again and again.
Well-meaning people, including me, will give you all kinds of advice. You should listen carefully, and weigh it seriously—and then, if you know it won’t work for you, quietly set it aside and move on. Nothing anyone tells you is set in stone. That includes everything on this page. If you know I’m talking nonsense, ignore me.
There are many ways to be a scholar, and none of them is the best. There is only what is best for you. Everyone has a different writing style, a different sense of what arguments are worth making, a different way of responding to objections. You will do better work—and be far happier—if you try to be the best version of yourself, rather than trying to be someone else.
Think about the scholarship you admire. What about it inspires you? Is it clarity? Empathy? Meticulousness? Imagination? Elegance? Precision? Humility? Wit? Rigor? Whatever it is, you can do it too. Through effort and practice, you can imbue your own work with the same qualities.
Now think about the scholars you admire. Whose way of being in the world seems like something you would like for yourself? Some people are ambitious; others are humble. Some are intense; some are relaxed. Some are serious; others are playful. Some live on the road; some are homebodies. They all made life choices to become the way that they are. You can make those choices too.
When you’re reading for a specific project, you’ll need to read everything in the literature that bears directly on it. The rest of the time, do your best to read widely rather than deeply. It’s much easier to bring in something useful from another part of your field than it is to invent something new in your subspecialty. You’ll be more creative, you’ll be part of more interesting conversations, and you’ll have more fun.
A good heuristic is the principle of maximum surprise. Find the gaps in your knowledge, and steer into them. If you know exactly what a paper is going to say based on the abstract, reading it is a waste of your time. Look for articles where you have no idea what to expect, where every sentence comes as a revelation.
The end of a good research agenda (in law, at least) should include a list of article ideas, described in a sentence or two each. It’s fine if they’re unrelated to each other, and it’s fine if many of them don’t directly bear on your main research interests. The point is not that you intend to write all of them up immediately, in order. The point is to demonstrate that you are a bottomless fountain of ideas and you will never be at a loss for something worthwhile to write about.
Now forget about the research agenda that you share with others. Make yourself a list of ideas to write about, a list so long you couldn’t possibly cover all of them in two lifetimes. Some of them you’ll get around to. Some will be preempted because someone else did it first and better. Some you’ll look into and realize that the idea itself was bunk. And some will sit there because you had more urgent projects to take on. All of this is fine. The list isn’t there to tell you what to write next. It’s there to inspire you, to remind you that you have options, to keep you from falling into a rut.
People with power will sometimes behave terribly toward you. They may make unreasonable demands on your time, pass off your work as their own, casually belittle your efforts, leave you out of conversations you should have been in, neglect their promises to you, and much more. But these are all them problems, not you problems.
Your first responsibility is take care of yourself. A close second is to take care of those around you. A distant third is to jump through the hoops that authority figures hold up for you. Do what you need to make it through. But don’t let it convince you that there is something wrong with you, and don’t let it convince you that this is how academia is supposed to be. You can be better, in every sense of the word.
Prestige and money sing a siren song. It’s easy to make career choices based on what the crowd considers important. But you aren’t the crowd. You’re you. Prestige and money can be means to an end. They can give you influence, if that matters to you, or flexibility, if that matters to you, or comfort, if that matters to you. But the things that matter to you matter because they matter to you. Far better to know what those things are, and to live toward them. Sometimes that means grabbing the brass ring; sometimes it means letting the ring go by.