“No one cares if a President or CEO hires a team of speechwriters, but the role of a scholar should be to take responsibility not just for approving the final product but for doing most of the research him- or herself.”

I agree with Stuart Buck’s description of the role of the scholar. However, I doubt that many law professors really possess the soul of the scholar. Most are essentially sophists who use their wit and verbal skills to make a living. The true scholar is more likely to be a store clerk who spends his or her free time at at library than a Harvard Law School professor (or a professor at most other law schools). Now, sophists can be very bright folks who can contribute to a society’s “intellectual capital.” But let’s not take them so seriously that we think that they are scholars, even if they hold “prestigious” positions at “elite” institutions.

I’ve noticed that if I read someone else’s summary of the law in a particular area, I’m inevitably constrained by the things that they have chosen to mention. If I go back and research an issue from scratch for myself, I might notice all sorts of trends or parallels or contradictions that seem interesting to me, but that someone else (particularly a law student) might not have picked up on. Moreover, just by doing the research for myself, I know the subject more thoroughly and deeply than if I merely read a memo in which someone else tries to summarize their own research.

There’s no excuse for a “scholar” to rely too heavily on the pre-packaged work of relative novices.

To my mind, it is scandalous and corrupt that such practices are tolerated. Not just that: The overly-extensive use of research assistants seems problematic to me too. No one cares if a President or CEO hires a team of speechwriters, but the role of a scholar should be to take responsibility not just for approving the final product but for doing most of the research him- or herself. I do not think that a “scholar” can make as much of a genuine scholarly contribution if he is mostly reviewing the research of novice underlings, rather than becoming familiar with the research materials for himself.

I’m curious: what would happen to the productivity of many famous “scholars” if they were barred from hiring or using research assistants for a few years?