By James Grimmelmann
Last updated January 2026
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.
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.
Well-meaning people, including me, will tell you what to do. All of it is good advice for someone, but it may not be good advice for you. 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.
A corollary is that you must not compare yourself too much to your peers. If you go down that road too far, it ends with you doing the same thing as them, only worse, because you will always be better at being you than at being them. You have to trust in your own ideas and your own processes enough to see them through, even when it looks like others are rolling from triumph to triumph. Everyone has inner struggles you can’t see; everyone has periods of great fortune that no one—not even them—can replicate on purpose.
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.
The same goes for negative examples. When you’re disappointed by a paper you read, ask yourself what you would have done differently—and then do that instead. If you see a senior figure in your field behaving in a way that strikes you as stressful and exhausting, remember that you are free to imitate only what you admire about them, and leave the rest behind.
It’s important to act like the kind of scholar and person you want to be, because acting like one is how you become one. (Vonnegut: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”) Do it now, because “next time” has a way of turning into “never.”
Just as important as your role models are your peers. Figure out whose company you want to keep, and keep them close. Who gets you? Who has the same ambitions? Who brings out the best in you? Seek out kindred souls; they will be your treasured friends and colleagues for decades.
The same goes for the communities you want to be part of. Ask your mentors and your more senior colleagues what’s out there: the conferences, workshops, and publication venues that are right for you. It’s easy to drift into only submitting to the big huge outlets because that’s where everyone in your program publishes. But your specific interests should take you to more specific events. Find the rooms full of people who have the same obsessions you do, the places where people present the kinds of work that make you feel at home.
The Malcolm Gladwell version of the 10,000-Hour Rule is a myth, but the underlying idea is obviously true. You get better at things by doing them, so do the things you want to get better at. If you want to be a better reader, read. If you want to be a better writer, write. If you want to be a better public speaker, speak in public.
A few corollaries are less obvious. The first is the sports aphorism to practice like you play. If you spend your time doing something that is somewhat but not really like the skill you want to develop, you will end up with that and not with what you wanted. If you write small, incremental papers because anything more ambitious feels like too much of a risk, you will only get good at writing small, incremental papers. If you take shortcuts and read in a hurry, you will get good at taking shortcuts and reading in a hurry. You have to do the thing itself.
The second is to embrace failure. Don’t expect to be good when you start doing something new. Do it anyway. Think of yourself as a beginning musician playing notes to see how they sound together, or a beginning artist mixing paints to see what colors result. Create things purely for yourself. Fail fast and fail often. Love your mistakes, and learn from them. Make a mess, clean it up! The only way out is through.
Your time is abundant; your time is scarce. You will always be torn between different things you could be doing: reading, writing, teaching, networking, exercising, partying, dating, parenting, and plain old relaxing, to name just a few. Time management can be especially hard when you have to balance a few large long-term goals—write a law-review article, say—with smaller tasks that are individually less important but collectively necessary. Get used to living with the question “What should I do now?” It will be with you for the rest of your career, and you will have to learn how to think about it without overthinking it.
The first thing to say is that lawyerly evasion, “It depends.” Most of all, it depends on your working style. You do you! Some people work well under deadline pressure, and for them strategic procrastination can be an effective strategy. Others need regular daily routines, and for them small and steady progress is the way to go. Pay conscious attention to what works and doesn’t work for you. Embrace what does and change what doesn’t.
It also depends on your mental and physical status. I have learned, for example, that I can write scholarship effectively only in a flow state. I can get myself into one reliably, but I have to have a substantial block of time and I have to be relaxed. If I’m excited (good) or agitated (bad), writing will not happen and I need to do something else instead. Pay attention to what your body is telling you and choose what to do next accordingly. Sometimes it’s “have a snack” or “go for a run”; sometimes it’s “format citations” or “find someone to help you talk through an idea.”
I find that it’s better to look backwards than forward. When you go to sleep at night, you should feel good about the day. Ask yourself, “Did I do something meaningful today?” rather than worrying about what you need to do tomorrow. When you wake up tomorrow, pick something to work on that you’ll feel good to have accomplished. When you look ahead, sometimes all you can see is a stress-inducing mountain of unfinished tasks, or you’ll unconsciously double- and triple-book your time. But in hindsight, you can take comfort that even if you didn’t do everything you might have hoped to, it was only because your hopes were unrealistically ambitious. As long as you did what you could, that’s all that anyone can ever ask of you.
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 weak spots 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. Non-academic reading is important, too. Read the news, read blogs, read newsletters and tweets and mailing lists and poems and novels. Watch short-form viral videos and long-form YouTube explainers. If it lights up the same part of your brain that gets happy when you read a good article, it’s relevant enough that you should feel fine about reading it on “work” time.
The world is wide and weird, and most of it will never make it into academic journals. In many fields, you can’t be an effective scholar unless you’re following current events. Laypeople are often far better at spotting an issue or explaining a point than academics are. But mostly, you’ll enjoy reading widely and weirdly, and isn’t that reason enough?
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.
Pick fewer battles than that. Put some battles back. That’s still too many battles. I understand that I’m a terrible role model. But believe me when I say that my work would be much better if there were 25% less of it.
You can’t do everything. You can’t even do as many things as you think. Most of your professional life will have to be saying “no” to things that would be wonderful—if they were the only thing on your plate. Some of my friends have “no”-buddies, who praise each other whenever they say “no” to a request to do something. Others keep punch cards: when they accumulate ten “no”s they’re allowed to say “yes” once.
Real artists ship. You have accomplished something worthwhile not when you start a project but when you share it with the world. It’s fine to put an hour or two into making notes or writing up the basics of what you’ll need to remember an idea later. But you shoudn’t start a project in earnest unless you are willing to take one of your other projects and accept that you may never complete it. Opportunity costs are very real, and you should devote your time to the projects that are most worth doing—compared to all the other wonderful projects you could be working on.
Many articles say that they “fill a gap” in the literature. The phrase is a cliché, but the impulse is good. There’s a common tendency in legal scholarship to write a paper that is 90% recap and 10% novel. Fight it! Write papers that are 10% recap and 90% novel.
It’s easy to break this rule unintentionally. You’ll learn something exciting, or have a revealing insight, and want to share it with the world. But just because something is new to you, that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s new to the community of scholars. I’ve found that my view of a topic is often shaped by the way I first learned it from a course or a book—along with whatever biases and blinders that first source had. Distrust your own knowledge. No idea is worth working up until you have done a literature review.
In particular, you always need to ask whether a new idea is just an old one in a mustache and glasses. Is there a doctrine that already does the necessary work? If there were, where would it show up in the caselaw and commentary? What would it be called? Most of the time—not all but most—I find that there’s already a good answer to my question. Instead of writing something up myself, I cite the existing work and move on.
There is no point in writing what everyone expects. Surprise yourself; surprise your readers. You don’t need to radically reimagine everything—if that’s your goal, you should probably be an artist rather than a scholar—but an article that never startles or unsettles probably isn’t worth writing. Fields of study tend to run in the same grooves again and again; steer off the road and it may be harder going but the scenery is far nicer.
For obvious reasons, this is a hard habit to cultivate. Making yourself into a bottomless fountain of ideas is a good start, because having more choices of what to work on helps you pick out the more interesting ones. Another helpful technique is to write in haste and edit at leisure, because you’re more likely to shake loose interesting ideas if you’re not overthinking it. There will be plenty of time later to see whether a quirky example or startling juxtaposition really works—but if you don’t write it down while you’re thinking of it, you won’t even get the chance to test it properly.
If you want people to understand your paper and build on it, everything about it needs to be as clear, as memorable, and as simple as it can possibly be. Literal elevator pitches aren’t the best way to convey ideas, but as a genre of writing, the elevator pitch rightly emphasizes these virtues. Of the three, I find simplicity to be the best starting place, because without it the other two are impossible. Here are a few techniques I use.
First, don’t be afraid to go visual and tactile as you work out the moving parts of your argument. I’m a big fan of putting everything on a whiteboard, or writing each piece on an index card and moving them around the floor. If you want to make a conspiracy wall, go for it. Arrange and rearrange until you have found the minimal set of concepts that explain your idea. Circle them, and then put everything else in its proper ordered relationship to them.
Second, the highest-stakes parts of your paper—the title, thesis, and abstract—need to be the most straightforward. Wordsmith them intensely. Try out variations. Read them aloud. Try rewriting them in Up Goer Five style (interactive dingus). Don’t rest until you feel confident you could explain the paper to a half-drunk friend of a friend at a noisy party. (Side benefit: it will make parties more fun.)
Third, give each paper as much time in the rock tumbler as it needs to shine. Read through the paper, top to bottom, fixing everything you can find that is awkard, confused, or wrong: spelling, wording, metaphors, paragraph flow, section order, and everything else large or small. Think about the paper on and off for two weeks but don’t look at it—then come back and go through it top to bottom again. Repeat as many times as you can stand. This is how you clean off the grit that obscures the elegance of your argument. Good work takes time, and time takes patience.
The quality of a life is not measured in years; the quality of an article is not measured in pages.
Never write filler. Make every section and every sentence worth reading. If the genre demands certain conventions, deal with them as succinctly as possible and move on. Respect your readers’ time and intelligence, and they will respect your efforts.
Some ideas are big; some are small. Don’t try to cram a big idea into a short paper, or to stretch a small idea into a long one. Some questions need to be worked out calmly and methodically; others are best tackled in one sitting in a white heat. Write in the genre that the idea itself tells you that it belongs in.
Sometimes, a paper surprises you as you’re writing it—your examples turn out to be redundant with each other, say, or a doctrinal point you thought would be easy to pin down wriggles out of your grasp. It’s not always within your control, but to the extent that you can, let the paper guide you to its new form. Don’t be afraid to insert an entire section even after the paper has been accepted; don’t be afraid to cut out pages of material if they’re not important to your argument.
That said, never throw away anything you write. When you cut out part of a paper, put it somewhere you can find it in case you want to paste it back in later. I keep files with names like “Consenting to Computer Use Scraps.” They contain anything I wrote that I decided wasn’t working, and when I finish a draft I look through the corresponding scraps file to see if there’s anything useful. Similarly, keep a junkyard of your abandoned papers and excised passages. Sometimes, the specialized part you need for a new paper will be sitting right there, ready for recycling. Some of my favorite articles are built around material that had been sitting in my junkyard for a decade.
Your advisors and mentors will—hopefully—do everything they can to help you develop into the best scholar and person you can be. But just like you are unique, so are they. Everyone has a different style.
In particular, and especially with your advisor if you are in a program with one, you need to be able to give them what they need to give you the best support they can. Some people need structured meetings with agendas that you prepare; others bring their own detailed checklists; still others are inspirational chaos muppets. Learn how to work with who they are.
Here’s an example: I discovered that one of my best mentors could only hear me talk about one idea in a meeting. If I brought them more, we would never get to them all because they would do a deep dive on the first thing I said. I learned how to pick the project I needed their help with most, and they gave it to me, brilliantly, on many occasions.
We’re in this business because we care about sharing knowledge. It’s almost willfully perverse to go through the immense effort of writing a work of scholarship, only to let it languish in obscurity where only a few people can read it. Although it’s not always possible to publish your work under fully open-access terms, you should do your best to make it as open as you can. I have found that almost all law reviews have author agreements that are compatible with Creative Commons licenses and are happy to put an explicit license grant in the author footnote.
Relatedly, do what you can to make your scholarship easy to download. Although law-review websites typically make articles available as PDFs, they are notoriously unstable, and tend to make breaking changes to the URLs in their archives every five to ten years. Repositories are good, and you should make sure that your articles are available in appropriate ones, like SSRN and arXiv. If you post a draft, come back after publication and add the full citation and the most authoritative version you’re able to. Even better, self-host your papers too, with direct PDF download links.
A personal website is your best chance to make a good first impression on potential colleagues and students; present yourself the way you want to be seen. Get a custom domain (your full name is a good default) and put up a professional homepage. The absolute minimum is a brief biography, a short summary of what you work on, your CV, and working links to all of your publications. A picture of you is optional, but I recommend it. (If you think a photograph is too boring, a painting, sketch, pixel-art rendition, or other human-made artistic depiction can also work.)
Treat your website as a long-term commitment. Update it as you add publications or professional accomplishments. You can build out other content over time, but in general you shouldn’t add something unless you’re willing to take on the associated maintenance for years to come. Above all else, do not let the domain name expire.
A social-media presence is optional. If you do have one, think about what tone you want to project, because it’s going to stick with you for a long time. Sarcastic or earnest? Pugnacious or even-tempered? You do you.
Every few years, a famous professor at a fancy law school publishes an article that gets the law badly wrong or plagiarizes from the souces it discusses. On investigation, it transpires that the professor copy-pasted text from a research assistant’s memo into an article draft. It’s not a good look, but it’s an obvious and forseeable risk of putting an RA’s work product anywhere near your own.
The same is true of generative AI. If you want to be a serious scholar with academic integrity, you should not let generative AI anywhere near your writing, not ever. If you use generative AI for writing-adjacent tasks, you will face a constant temptation to accept its outputs without reviewing them carefully line by line. You may even trick yourself into a kind of normalized deviance based on the fact that you’ve been using generative AI and nothing has gone catastrophically wrong yet. Emphasis on yet. Sooner or later you will end up with listeria in the liverwurst.
The essential promise of any honest scholar is that you are personally responsible for every word you publish. Overreliance on generative AI can will lure you into complacency and inattentiveness—only to betray you with hallucinations at the worst possible moment. Don’t put yourself in a position where you run the risk of screwing up this badly.
If that doesn’t convince you, consider the following, from T.W. Korner’s The Pleasures of Counting:
The plans for the San Francisco metro BART called for the trains to be fully automated but to carry a conductor in case of emergencies. It was pointed out that the kind of person who would be happy to ride back and forth without doing anything for nine years would be precisely the person least capable of coping with an emergency in the tenth.
Don’t deskill yourself. If you use AI to produce good-enough prose with decent arguments, you will never become capable of writing great prose with ironclad arguments. Even if there’s never a disaster, do you want to be the kind of scholar who is happy to ride back and forth for nine years without doing anything?
Typesetting your writing is like showering before going out in public. Even people who don’t consciously notice will appreciate it, and you will feel more confident and professional. Spend some time with Matthew Butterick’s Typography for Lawyers. The website is good, but it’s worth owning the book in hard copy. (If you want to go deeper, also read Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style.) Essential rules to follow include using curly quotes, avoiding system fonts, proper line and paragraph spacing, and a reasonable line length.
It goes without saying but is worth emphasizing that you should always use people’s preferred names and pronouns. That includes spelling their names correctly, something that I’m particularly attuned to as a two-ns-at-the-end Grimmelmann. For non-English names in Latin scripts, use proper accents and diacritics. For names in other writing systems, use a typeface in that writing system where appropriate, and use the person’s preferred Romanization or an authoritative system (e.g., pinyin) when transliterating.
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.
If you will sometimes encounter awful people, you will also encounter wonderful ones. Know who your allies are, the ones who genuinely care about supporting each other through thick and thin. You will have to make difficult decisions about how much to confide in people, and while it’s never easy, it’s at least easier if you have thought in advance about who you can trust when the going gets touch.
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.
My thanks to the junior scholars who have given me suggestions on what this page should say, and who have gently corrected my many errors. I am more grateful to them than they can know.
