My TLS editor on writing - an editor's email to an author

Ben Wittes and I were on a panel on Thursday at the meetings of the American Society of International Law, called writing for the mass media.  Advice to law professors on how to place things in the mass media; I'm a bit of a fraud on that, as I don't really write that much for mass venues.  Ben, on the other hand, is a real journalist.  However, I did read to the audience the following email, received from my TLS editor in the midst of editing something years ago.  I keep a copy up on my wall, although I can't really say I am good about following it.  It's very good advice:

***

Ken, you really think this is short?  May I enjoin you further on the virtues of concision.  There are too many long quotes from the book, for a start.  And I fear you risk partaking of the book's clearly leisurely pace and alleviatedly theoretical tone.  Unalleviatedly theoretical!  You!  Que pasa?

Maybe you haven't quite come down from your sojourn in the jungle of tenure-grabbing, publish-or-perish academic vanity publishing.  This is journalism, albeit the higher journalism. People don't have too much time.

The piece reads airlessly for the first half.  Look, there's nothing here that can't be said in half - no, a third - the space.

(Email to Ken, June 2001.)

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for praise for Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism

I am flattered and delighted that Andrew Sullivan, over at his blog The Daily Dish, (unaccountably) listed my Weekly Standard essay from last week, Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism: The deeply dispririting Romney-Huckabee religion showdown, as his pick for best political essay of 2007.  It might well have been the last political essay of 2007 that Mr. Sullivan happened to read, but far be it from me ever turn down praise like that.   My thanks to Andrew Sullivan; I am honored.  (Let me also thank, once again, my editor at the Weekly Standard, Richard Starr, who both did a superb editing job and also gave me the space to say what I wanted to say.)

(Thanks Scott for pointing me to this.)

Thanks to Instapundit for linking to my Jack Goldsmith review in the TLS

My thanks to Glenn Reynolds here at Instapundit for linking to my review in the Times Literary Supplement (London) of Jack Goldsmith's superb The Terror Presidency.  (You can get directly to my Goldsmith review here.)

One of the things I listened to closely while writing that review was the Instapundit podcast interview with Jack Goldsmith, which I highly recommend and which you can reach at this link.

Glenn, thanks as ever! 

(And if any Instapundit readers come here after visiting the TLS, let me just say that I regard the TLS as the finest literary review in the world.  It covers a breathtaking range of subjects, its discussion of literature is unsurpassed anywhere, and if you are a student or, really, anyone looking to hone your own essay and prose style, read the TLS for models on how to write.)

To this blog's Palestinian readers researching prescriptivism and descriptivism

I noticed looking at the site meter that at this moment this blog has a number of readers from the West Bank apparently researching prescriptivism and descriptivism. Welcome - and if you have particular questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I'll try to put up some special post if it is something that I feel expert enough to answer. It's not clear from the google queries exactly in what subject matter you mean the terms prescriptivism and descriptivism - they are used in somewhat different ways across a variety of fields ranging from grammar to moral philosophy to politics and international relations. But if your question is in an area I know something about, I'd be happy to help.

Sneering, snideness, irony, and blogging

The tone I most dislike in political blogging is the sneer. Sneering and snideness. The sneering aside that acts as an emotional drive-by rather than direct engagement in the polite and polished civil discourse that provides grounds for civil and civilized disagreement. Irony, when not done in a friendly fashion - irony when really and truly meant - has much the same effect because it means you don't address an argument or a person holding such an argument but instead, in effect, address yourself to an imaginary audience that already agrees with you, sitting in emotional, not rational, judgment upon your subject. It only succeeds as a tone because you have already decided in advance that you are interested merely in conversing with those who already agree with you, and conveys the message to anyone else that you are not interested in discussion, but only in a priori agreement. It is an emotional tone in lieu of reasoned discussion, and serves as gatekeeper (I'm only interested in those who already agree with me) through affect, rather than an invitation to reason together. I try not to indulge that here; not sure I always succeed.

Sundays with Stendhal 4.5 (special midweek edition)

Professor Erik Jensen, Case Western, has posted a much discussed essay on SSRN, here, addressing that vital question of the law professor dress code or dress non-code. It has elicited some comment among the law professoriat, including this rather decisive thumbs-down from Professor Stephen Bainbridge, UCLA, here, and a more agnostic referral over to the apparently even worse dressing among philosophers by Professor Larry Solum, Illinois, here. And Althouse, here.

Well. I am afraid that I live a few blocks from my law school, often ride my bike, almost always walk back and forth between my campus and office a couple of times each day ... and when I'm not teaching class, I do indeed frequently show up in shorts and a T-shirt. In the classroom, I usually wear nice denim and a button down shirt or a polo shirt. I have tried experimenting this year with a sports coat to see if the students are somehow more respectful of my age and experience - well, they are still basically surfing the internet, so answer is no. My dean once told me years ago, only partly tongue in cheek, that I had singlehandedly lowered dress standards at the law school. It is often hot and muggy in DC - today it is over 80 degrees on October 22, though the humidity is low - especially if you grew up with the humidities on the West Coast that are currently contributing to the burn-down of southern California, and rather than scruffy, I regard myself as environmentally correct by walking and biking to school. So there. Of course, even if I didn't have environmental virtue to fall back on, I'm sure I would do exactly the same thing anyway.

But as to the question of neckties ... well, I was reminded of this passage from The Red and the Black. Julien has been on a secret mission for his employer, the Marquis de La Mole, to London, and is on his way back via Strasbourg, when he runs into his old friend, the Russian Prince Korasoff - I will post bits of their charming conversation over time, but for the moment, a special midweek Stendhal post - per neckties, which began their sartorial existence as cravats:

"Come into this shop," the Prince said, "look at that charming black cravat; you would say it was made by John Anderson of Burlington Street; do me the pleasure of buying it, and throwing right away that dreadful black rope which you have round your neck."

***

The Russians imitate French ways, but always at a distance of fifty years. They have now reached the days of Louis XV.

(The Red and the Black, part II, Chapter 54, Strasbourg.)

(The last quoted bit about the Russians is, naturally, directed at the Volokhs - all of them! Even the ungenetically-linked co-Conspirators!)

ps. I fully understand Althouse's and Jensen's Tom Wolfe description:

[H]e had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of this gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old...

Quite right and likely applies to me, ossified seven year old. And yet, when it comes to some level of comfort ... I just can't seem to much care. Probably I have a certain circuit loose - my older brother the neuropsychiatrist points out that a sign of senility and dementia, and depression, is lack of attention to personal appearance, a loss of vital interaction with the world and an awareness of how the world sees you. But the fact is, I was never able to write a comprehensible word in a suit, back in law practice - all of it waited, or a whole lot of it waited, until I got home and was able to change into something comfortable and get out of the suit and actually write. I have no idea why.

Althouse mentions comfort in a suit. I pulled down Hollander's two superb books on fashion, Seeing Through Clothes and Sex and Suits. Hollander talks about how suits look great and are comfortable and all that. Hmm. Possibly if you not an overweight middle age guy with a paunchy stomach. They do indeed make you look better than a lot of other clothing, true. But I don't find them comfortable.

However, more interesting to me is that suits, and semi formal, uniform clothing for men homogenize in a different way - they make younger men look older and older men look younger. They equalize the underdevelopment of youth and the coming decrepitude of age, in each case by covering them up with the same standard uniform, and therefore convey a certain equality of power across generations.

New - International Law Observer blog

I'm delighted to report that Dominik Zimmermann, of the Max Planck Institute, and some friends have created a new blog on international law, the International Law Observer. I've checked it out and find it informative and interesting. I'm adding it to my blog roll, and I encourage you to check it out. Here's a bit from Dominik's email describing it:

May I draw your attention to a new Weblog on international law, the International Law Observer:

A couple of weeks ago I created this Blog with some friends, who are all researchers in the fields of public international law or EU/EC-Law and active at various European universities or research institutions. It is our aspiration that this Blog will in some way promote the critical debate on up-to-date legal developments in international law, by reporting on recent developments in the academic field(s), informing on influential case-law of (inter-)national tribunals and courts and presenting international custom and important legislation by international organizations.

We hope that this Blog will contribute to the constructive exchange of ideas between scholars, practitioners and other active users and visitors of Legal-Weblogs. Moreover, the Blog attempts to function as a useful addition to the already existing line of Blogs on topical issues of international law. In order to enhance the interactivity between the pertinent Weblogs and to provide a complete as possible coverage of topical issues for the readers, we added a link to your Weblog in our link section. We would be very grateful if you would do the same.

Of course, comments and suggestions on our Weblog (design/shape as well as contents) are much appreciated.

By all means check it out, and a warm welcome to Dominik and friends to the blogosphere!

What I'm reading, an irregular series ...

As you can tell, I am dodging work for a couple of hours this afternoon and idly posting ... I have my UN manuscript to complete (it is very far along, I'm delighted to say, although less sure about its readability), and a Simpsons Movie review for the TLS to complete. In theory, writing the Simpsons review should be a break from the harder work of writing the UN manuscript, but unfortunately, as my Simpsons review has - gulp, ultimate sin of a review of a summer comedy - got somewhat serious, it has got harder to finish. But here's what I am reading these days:

The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror, by Stephen Holmes. I finished this a few days ago, then read Peter Berkowitz's review in Policy Review, here, "Vulgarizing the War Debate."

If anything, I think Peter is too nice about this book. In an earlier post on this blog, I remarked on my experience over the last year and a half of being a panelist at academic conferences in which the principal and largely unchallenged assumption was that terrorism was not really the issue, an overblown American response was; terrorism, according to one academic panelist, in a phrase I have made my own (by way of dispute, however), is merely a "second order" problem. Marty Lederman, in a comment on that post, said that he hangs out with a lot of critics of the administration but has never heard such sentiments. Well, perhaps we mean different things by such labels - but a couple of further commentators to that post weighed in with several examples of "terrorism is a second order problem" thinking. One is the recent (late 2006) Foreign Affairs article by political scientist John Mueller,"Is there still a terrorist threat?" and answering no. Indeed, answering that there never really was one as such, it was all overblown and mostly imagined.

To this canon we must add Professor Holmes' Matador's Cape. Let me be honest, I've never been a fan of Holmes's work - yes, of course, leading political theorist, all that, but the hatchet job he did in his 1993 The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism on thinkers ranging from Christopher Lasch to Roberto Unger was so egregious that I've never been able to take him seriously again. All wit, all the time; serious, accurate readings of his targets, something else again.

(It was also Peter Berkowitz, by the way, who most precisely and comprehensively revealed the level of selective quotation, contrived misreadings of key texts, etc., that made up the 1993 book, here - something that I don't suppose improved Peter's tenure prospects in Harvard's government department - although Peter liked somewhat more Holmes' later Passions and Constraints (1995), here. However, the one who had the most reason to be angered by the misreadings was, for my money, Unger who, however, has long tended to take such attacks in stride.)

My objections to the Matador book are essentially a somewhat more indignant version of Peter's. Holmes switches arguments as it suits him, depending on the target, with little attention to the intellectual inconsistencies - and worse, inconsistencies implied for actual policy - and an insouciant attitude that the real issue is not out there, it is in here; the issue is not terrorism, it is (the excesses of, the inherent illiberalism of) counterterrorism.

Capital Ideas Evolving, by Peter L. Bernstein. A decade ago I reviewed Bernstein's superb Against the Gods: The story of risk in the TLS, here. But Bernstein, that rare combination of a scholar-writer-practical investment banker (the one other outstanding example I can think of is James MacDonald, author of the wonderful A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy), had actually begun his writing on finance theory and history with a 1970s book on the new financial theories entering the capital markets - the theories of efficient markets, options pricing models, etc. This new book offers a new perspective on those theories and their successors, both as an intellectual matter and a practical matter in the markets. I have just started it, and am greatly enjoying it. Students - but not just students, by any means - I think, would get a great deal from this book. One of my criticisms of how economics is taught is not just its widely commented abstraction - the number of law students I teach who have had multiple classes in undergraduate economics where they drew many supply-demand curves but have not the faintest idea what any of it means in the real world, well, they are legion - but also its determined ahistoricism. To conceive of economics as having a genuine intellectual history is, apparently, to deprive it of claims to Truth and Science (analytic philosophy long had precisely such an attitude toward intellectual history). More when ... I have actually read the book.

Model Behavior, by Jay McInerney. A well known and justly very well regarded international law professor - which is to say, a serious intellectual who is the real deal, even when, as is frequently the case, we disagree - dropped me a note to say that he had read a book I had commented on earlier, AA Gill's Starcrossed, and rather enjoyed it. Hooray! But I'll let him remain nameless because my wife started into the book, and told me that I could talk all I wanted about Gill's take on Antigone and his infectious enthusiasm for poetry, about the book's wry insight into the nature of celebrity, fame, and money - at the end of the day this book was just another in the genre of male fantasy novels about models-actresses who take up relationships with men for whom in real life one can't possibly imagine it happening. Chick lit for guys, I think she put it. Well. Errr. Hmm. Surely not. Couldn't possibly be.

There being no good response to that, at least by a middle aged academic who can't afford a midlife crisis, let me instead offer another in the "chick lit for guys" category - Model Behavior by that now-out-of-fashion bad boy of lit, Jay McInerney. I found it by complete accident - our home bookshelves are crowded with books that somehow arrived, wound up there, drifted in with the spring pollen, somehow took up residence, even though I've never read or even noticed them. This was one of them - I noticed it while we were eating picnic style in front of a video a couple of weeks ago. I had no idea what it was. It's okay but not great; I read it all the way through mostly to find out if "they" got back together. And when that's the reason you're reading a novel - what did Jean-Marie call it? Chick lit for guys? Never.

Airplane reading on the long flights to and from Chile: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Book of the Dead, being the latest in the Special Agent Pendergrast series, and Lee Child, Bad Luck and Trouble, being the latest Jack Reacher novel. There are others, but I'll only embarrass myself further.

(There are two authors who require separate, serious discussions. One is Tod Lindberg and his new The Political Teachings of Jesus, and the other is Francisco Goldman, his new nonfiction account of the murder of Bishop Gerardi in Guatemala, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?, but also his whole fiction canon. They are both old and dear friends.)

Dan Solove's annual law professor blog survey

Professor Solove has posted his informative annual survey of law professor blogs, here.

I'm not so sure this blog really fits the "law professor blog" category, alas - certainly at this point it is badly named, as I am as likely to post on music or food as I am on laws of war or international law. Overall, my sense of law professor blogging is that it is most likely to stay focused on a legal topic where it is a group blog, with some sense of disciplinary discipline - international law, whatever it might be. A group blog also has the virtue of having a certain dependable volume of quality, informative posts in some area of law. Most professors, me included, read blogs to get current information, or some idea of matters on which we should be getting information. Not really to find out what Professor Anderson is playing on his cello, or even his electric cello. And not really to find out what Professor Anderson thinks about the Simpsons Movie, even if he is reviewing it for somebody or other. When you are on a serious group blog, you tend to have a mission and a sense of professionalism that, sadly, I quite lack on this blog. I post on this blog mostly in my downtime, when I am not thinking all that hard. There are some exceptions, but that's mostly what I do here.

I also use a blog as a means for advertising pieces of mine that might not otherwise have much exposure - who is going to look at the Madrid Revista de Libros, for example, if you're not in Spain? I subscribe, but does anyone else? For that matter, how many law professors read the TLS these days? Unless you are a big name professor, generally at a big name school, the mechanisms for distributing stuff have got very confused.

So I am a little bit embarrassed to have this infotainment blog posted up there along with all those other professionally serious blogs. Also, I'm embarrassed not to have some clever name for it. Balkinization - there's genius for you! The only thing that crossed my mind was "Andersonville," and that seemed to convey the wrong message, somehow.

My impression, too, is that there are a lot of quite serious professors who, for good reasons, stay well away from blogging as, well, a waste of time. They're probably right - it is uncannily similar, is it not, to that scene in Steve Martin's LA Story, where he and some friend go roller-skating through an LA art museum - "performance art, I call it," "goofing around, she calls it." Or something like that.

Larry Solum's Legal Theory Lexicon on 'legitimacy'

Larry Solum (that's Lawrence B. Solum, John E. Cribbet Professor at the University of Illinois College of Law, Champaign and Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois, to you, thank you very much - one of our leading jurisprudentialists and, I'm pleased to say, a dear friend over several decades) publishes, as part of the well-known Legal Theory Blog, a gradually expanding dictionary of basic concepts in legal theory called the Legal Theory Lexicon. It is of immense value not just to students - it is aimed at first year law students with an interest in theory - but also to professors and others looking for a short but always intelligent and straightforward account of key concepts and terms, ranging from legal philosophy to law and economics and so on.

In his most recent post, Larry takes up that question so vital in discussions of international law - certainly it is at the center of much of my own work whether in law narrowly or such broader areas as international organizations, global civil society, the UN, etc. - what is legitimacy?

As Larry himself would say on the Legal Theory Blog, highly recommended! Here is a bit to give you the flavor:

Normative and Sociological Legitimacy

Let’s begin with the distinction between normative legitimacy and sociological legitimacy. On the one hand, we talk about legitimacy as a normative concept. When we use “legitimacy” in the normative sense, we are making assertions about some aspect of the rightness or wrongness of some action or institution. On the other hand, legitimacy is also a sociological concept. When we use legitimacy in the sociological sense, we are making assertions about legitimacy beliefs--about what attitudes people have. Although these two senses of legitimacy are related to one another, they are not the same. That’s because an institution could be perceived as legitimate on the basis of false empirical beliefs or incorrect value premises. The opposite can be true as well: a controversial court decision (Roe, Bush v. Gore, etc.) could have been perceived as illegitimate, even if it had been a legitimate decision.

Conceptions of Legitimacy

Concepts and Conceptions

The distinction between normative and sociological legitimacy is important, but, by itself, it doesn’t get us very far. What does “legitimacy” mean? How is “legitimacy” different from “justice” or “correctness”? Those are deep questions—deserving of a book-length answer. My general policy in the Lexicon series is to steer a neutral course—avoiding controversial assertions about debatable matters of legal theory. But when it comes to legitimacy, it is difficult to stick to this plan. The difficulty is not so much that legitimacy is the subject of a well-defined debate; rather, the problem is that the concept of legitimacy is usually ill-defined and undertheorized.

So here is the strategy we will use. Let’s borrow the concept/conception distinction for a starting point. Let’s hypothesize that there is a general concept of legitimacy but that this concept is contested—different theorists have different views about what legitimacy consists in. Some theorists think that legitimacy is conferred by democratic procedures; others may think that legitimacy is a function of legal authorization. Let’s take a look at four different notions of legitimacy ....

24 hours in DC, then back to Paris

This is somewhat mad, I agree, a twenty four hour detour from London to DC and back to Paris. I have been teaching in my law school's Europe program this summer, just having spent a very lovely week in London. The students in this year's program are excellent, attentive despite the obvious distractions of London. I'm here with my wife, daughter, and our niece, a student at BYU who has just announced her engagement. We've done some plays, some museums, all the usual tourist stuff.

In addition, my younger brother is a seventh or so year associate in tax and private equity in London at Debevoise and Plimpton, and we have had a rare chance to hang out with him and his filmmaker wife, in between her filmmaking (and filmmaking money raising trips) to her native Hong Kong. We spent a nice evening at their Islington apartment eating Kit's fabulous duck, a marvelous chocolate-pear tart and listening to the trubo-charged folk-rock of their ukelele band, in which Kit plays one of eight ukeleles and John plays fretless bass guitar and also serves as producer and mixer and recording engineer. The band has been playing weddings and some arts festivals. If you think that ukeleles are just these little twangy things - like I did - you - we - are greatly misinformed.

I also had a chance to have coffee with Anthony Dworkin, an old friend and editor of the Crimes of War Project website. I was legal editor of the original Crimes of War book, under the general editors Roy Gutman and David Rieff, and Anthony, a journalist and writer who has gradually emerged as a leading expert in these areas, is bringing out a second edition of that book in August 2007. A lot has changed - the important areas of emphasis have changed - of course since the first edition in 1998. If you have the first edition, you need the second edition, and if you haven't seen it at all, you should check it out at the end of the summer - it is one of the most handsome books in the area, well written and expertly edited, and with fabulous illustration and design. Anthony is one of the smartest writers in the general area of security, laws of war, etc., and I hope that he puts all the work he has done over the past decade into a book on the general question of American policy and international law.

Alas, John Ryle was in Sudan this week, not London, and Philip Bobbitt was traveling someplace else too.

Meanwhile, I am actually in DC as I write this, not London. Family went on to Paris, and the students went on to Brussels, where I am not teaching. I have returned to DC for a meeting with folks from the Hoover Institution on counterterrorism policy. I then get on a plane and return to Paris tonight, in time to teach on Tuesday. Crazy schedule, yes, but I thought the meeting was a very important one for my work and writing. In Paris - besides the usual tourist things - I plan to go on a special search for French chocolate, admire in the bookstores first editions I can't afford of Blaise Cendrars and Rene Char, and see the exhibit at the National Library on the centenary of the birth of Rene Char. And purchase another copy in French of Leaves of Hypnos, which has somehow disappeared.

On the airplane back to DC, I read and finished a really funny, viciously sweet, British novel by the London writer AA Gill, Starcrossed. It is explicitly a rewrite - a very, very explicit rewrite - of that sappy 90s Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant romantic comedy, Notting Hill, complete with the American superstar Lee Montana ("rear of the year in fourteen countries, darling") and a London bookshop clerk and aspiring poet, John Dart. It is sexually punchy - I'd love to give it to my fourteen year old to show her that I can like chick-lit if done properly (well, in some alternate universe, maybe), but the sex is too lurid and nasty for her, or at least for Daddy to give to her, although not as much so as in AA Gill's also wonderful earlier London comedy of manners, Sap Rising. It's vicious and tellingly bitchy in many of its asides and social observations; Gill is an expert, so far as I can tell as a non-English outsider, at English comedy of manners. Yet in the end, though, despite all Gill's efforts, and the efforts of the reviewers, to show that he is a nasty prick and misanthropic, even misogynist novelist (this novel did win the bad sex award, and with good reason), he is a romantic, indeed a sentimentalist, who can't resist a sweet and happy ending - think The Red and the Black as farce with a happy, Hollywood ending to the battles between Julian and Mathilde. I thought it was both hysterically funny as well as rather wise on the question of romance and celebrity. I was actually moved, to my own surprise, by the way in which Gill wrapped the last third of the novel into a sort of take on Antigone, and ended the book with a speech by the Chorus - maybe it was just too long a plane ride, but I found myself thinking back to that fabulous production of Oedipus Rex at the ART at Harvard a couple of years ago that I saw by accident on a free evening passing through Cambridge MA in 2004. (Ms. Montana is in London because she has rather unwisely decided to show the world that she can do serious, RSC theatre, even cast as Antigone, with interesting results.) I was also taken with the fact that, against considerable odds, Gill himself is still quite in love with the idea of poetry, even contemporary poetry, and literature as actually revelatory of something in the human condition. Anyway, I liked it (interesting - I find myself saying that rather defensively), whereas Notting Hill made me cringe with embarrassment, it was so sappy.

(The earlier book, Sap Rising, elicited squeals of delight in some quarters and howls of protest in others, which made for a remarkable set of jacket reviewer quotes. The Guardian: "Do not buy this book." Evening Standard: "He writes so brilliantly." AN Wilson: "Extremely badly written, hideously and unamusingly obscene." Marie Claire: "A clever, sexy story." New Statesman: "Frightful pile of garbage." ... Well, perhaps the TLS got it exactly right: "This is a dirty book.")

Okay. Off to my meeting and then back to Paris.

(Ps so here's more about Gill, from a Guardian interview, here.)

International Law Reporter Blog

I've mentioned this before, but if you haven't had a chance to check out Jacob Katz Cogan's International Law Reporter blog, here, it is well worth it. It is great to have all the current international law stuff in one easy place. Thanks, Professor Cogan!