The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
I Am Not a Fan of Law Professor Books. Why Did I Just Write One?
The first in a series about "The Digital Fourth Amendment."
My first book, The Digital Fourth Amendment, came out last month. I wanted to write some posts on the book over the next week. And I figured I should start with the most fundamental question: Why on earth did I write this book?
The thing is, I don't really believe in law professor books. I mean, I know they exist. But I've usually thought of most law professor books as a waste of time. First, most law professor books are too long and too dense. People might buy them and put them on the shelf, but does anyone actually read them?
And second, why hide away your writing in a book, when you could much more easily just write an article and put it on SSRN for anyone to read? If you're trying to reach an audience, wouldn't you want to make the ideas as accessible as possible for them rather than require readers to pay for the privilege? In academic fields where books are the coin of the realm, fine, write a book. But in legal academia, law review articles are still the base currency. Why not stick with that?
For these reasons, I've been a law professor for almost 25 years, but I have never written a book.
But wait, this post is about my new book, The Digital Fourth Amendment. If I don't really believe in law professor books, why did I write one?
To answer that, I need to give you some background. I'd guess that I've written something like forty articles on the Fourth Amendment over the years, more than half of which focus on questions of new technology. The big issue those articles take on is how to interpret the Fourth Amendment in the context of digital evidence. Most cover what is, at least on the surface, pretty narrow topics. I like to write quite narrowly, focusing on a very specific problem that the courts are confronting in the field and offering thoughts on how courts should resolve it.
As a strategy, this has pros and cons. No small number of elite academics think it is weird. We live in an academic world of grand theorizing. To a lot of academics, writing a narrow article about a specific new problem courts are starting to confront comes off as small-minded. It's—gasp!— doctrinal. Ew. But my ultimate goal has been to influence a body of emerging law, and you do that by writing in ways that those who will determine the body of law understand and appreciate. Writing in ways that judges and lawyers can use means writing narrowly.
I decided to write the book because I came to think that although the narrow articles were effective in that way, there could be a lot of value in presenting the big picture. A book would let me start from the beginning, explain what the Fourth Amendment is about, explain the challenge of digital evidence, and run through a bunch of the main problems that the courts are currently confronting—and what they're doing so far, and should be doing. In other words, a book would let me put all of these papers in context. It would give the 30,000 foot perspective for the general reader of the big ideas.
As part of that commitment, I wrote the book from scratch. Even where I was writing on topics that I had covered in prior articles, I decided to write the chapters without first re-reading the old articles. My thought was that this kept the chapters more readable and coherent, and it also meant that the argument reflected my current thinking rather than what I thought before when I had first written on the topic (sometimes twenty years earlier).
As for the concern that books are too long and too dense, I did my best to keep it snappy and short. It's 200 pages of text plus 40 pages of notes, so it's on the shorter side of these things.
Anyway, that's why I wrote the book. Next up, some of the big themes of the book, as well as some of the specific chapter coverage and new topics.
