I will be attending the 2010 Intellectual Property Scholars Conference next week at UC Berkeley, as an observer rather than a presenter. I’m looking forward to the conference: seeing lots of friends, listening to presentations, fishing for great new papers. But I have a curmudgeon’s view of much of the working-paper-conference phenomenon. Rather than wait until the conference is over to express that view, I’ll put it out here now. From this post-IPSC post that I wrote all the way back in 2007:
Law professors who don’t have terminal degrees don’t get trained in the ethos of scholarship the way that graduate students are supposed to, so learning an ethos is sometimes a hit-or-miss proposition. In IP, with the growth in the field over the last several years, there are a couple of places (in addition to not submitting a paper when an abstract has promised one) where the misses are pretty obvious.
One is presenting raw and half-baked ideas at big public conferences like this one. Presenting a work-in-progress doesn’t necessarily mean presenting an unfinished work. There are times and places for sharing very-early-stage work: With small numbers of trusted friends and colleagues. At brown-bag lunches. With an Associate Dean for Faculty Development, or a mentor, if there is one. At roundtables organized for that purpose. At a big public conference, however, the paper may not be in its final form, but the form that is delivered should be final. That type of conference isn’t always a reputation maker, but it can be a reputation breaker. And the audience will give better and more thoughtful feedback to a presentation that has been evidently thought through than it can to one whose gaps are obvious.
Two is not being aware of the historical context of the work. By far the biggest flaw in presentations and papers by junior IP scholars (and sometimes by more senior IP scholars) was and is their evident ignorance of earlier work. And not just or even work published within the last year or last five years; I’m thinking of the fact that a lot of foundational work published ten years ago or earlier remains significant today. IP doesn’t have a sclerotic hierarchy, but it does have senior people who are still active scholars today, and their earlier work still matters. And, of course, there is quite a lot of relevant work from decades ago and scholars no longer with us.
That post prompted several great comments, which are still worth reading.
It took me a while to do something in response to my own critique, but at last, earlier this year, I stepped out with a series of blog posts that I called “Lost Classics of Intellectual Property Law,” identifying older works of patent, trademark, and copyright scholarship that are important to the history of the discipline(s). The series begins here, and it (and each list) is a work in progress.
Can’t help but note the massive increase in the scope of the conference, which you noted in 2007 and which continues apace.
I first spoke at the third IPSC, in 2003. I gave one of the 9 papers at that 1.5-day conference. There were no separate rooms running in parallel.
At this years IPSC, which I’m delighted to be attending and presenting at, the ninth paper will start in one of four rooms at about 10:30 am of the first morning.
It’s BIG.
I’ll see you both there. I’m giving a 12-minute talk about my book. So it’s not that I don’t have anything to say, it’s more that I don’t know exactly how to pare things down to a palatable size.
I remember your old post, Mike, and while I am looking forward to this, these sorts of brief talks are sort of their own thing, I think. They aren’t our native form, which is the article, so to the extent we are all good at writing law review articles (???), that won’t translate into giving great 12-minute presentations.
Oddly, the presentations are more like micro-teaching exercises in terms of the presentation skill sets required, but how many of us have really mastered our basic teaching skills? And when we teach each other, it’s a whole different sort of presentation, which we only do at these sorts of things.
See you in California.
“12 minutes” is hanging over my head like a dark storm cloud…
Greg,
I certainly see your point, and there is something to be said both descriptively and normatively for a conference “vignette-o-thon” that showcases a certain type of teaching skill more than it communicates substantive ideas.
Even at that level, I still wish (perhaps it’s my nostalgia for the long ago days of 2000!) that the “teaching” displays were 20, or even 30 or 45 minutes long.
Beyond that, I think that the “vignette” approach has a difficult time standing on its own. Each 12-minute “bit” (shades of Oliar and Sprigman) is in effect a commercial, advertising two things: the reputation of the presenter, and an abstract. The reputation side is complicated, as you know probably better than I do. And each abstract is a long, textual commercial that advertises — Part I of a paper, which is all that many people (including me) are usually inclined to read, at least to begin with. And so on. (Part I advertises the whole work, the whole work advertises a body of work, and along the way, each of these things recursively advertises the author’s reputation.) If we are in the business of communicating our ideas via the papers themselves, and I like to think that we are, even though I know that we often are not, then one’s performance at a vignette-o-thon has a lot of work to do.
No pressure, Bruce.
For those of us missing IPSC, is there any news on when and where WIPIP will be?
There “where” of WIPIP is: BU.
The “when” has not been announced.
Wow, that list of presentations is very impressive. Wish I could be there! Hopefully I will be at WIPIP.
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