You Keep Using That Word
First published: September 2, 2026. Posted here for archival purposes.
Everything in Between” is about the systems, institutions, and practices that people build, “things” of a sort that sit in between us, between groups of us, between “us” and “them,” and between us and other systems and institutions that seem terribly far away: “the market,” “the state,” the universe, and so on.
In addition to my posts here, I co-host a podcast titled “Your Leadership Podcast,” which is available on Spotify and wherever fine podcasts are available. I write about law and legal education at TaxProf Blog and for several years co-hosted a podcast about technology and law titled “Your Future Law Podcast.“ My older blog about Pittsburgh and renewing cities, Pittsblog, is still available online, as is my original blog about law, technology, and governance.
When I write about legal education, I am writing about legal education, but I am also writing about higher education. The law school stands in for the university, in an incomplete and imperfect way; the dysfunctions and inadequacies of contemporary lawyer training and legal scholarship anticipate and mirror many of the dysfunctions and inadequacies of contemporary college teaching and (waves hands at all of) research.
But not even gets or sees the equation, which is one reason why I (sometimes) write about legal education over at TaxProf Blog (and now, elsewhere, and stand by there – and here – for more), and why I (usually) write about higher education here.
But I need to cross the streams, Ghostbusters-style. It’s time for some total protonic reversal. I am ignoring what Peter Venkman called an “important safety tip.”
Boomer humor aside:
At TaxProf Blog the other day, I posted a bit about “innovation” in legal education. I’m re-posting it here, in its entirety, because what I have to say about a certain bit of news in legal education circles applies, conceptually at least, to equivalent bits of news in higher education circles.
How do I know? Because entirely independently of me, Hollis Robbins made this comment in a Substack note:
Today’s Chronicle of Higher Ed list of 16 “people to watch” (you don’t need to read it) includes the usual list of people who got the sector into this mess. It’s all politics and business as usual. Not a single person is challenging the underlying structures causing a decline in quality around the county ….
Aha.
Here we go. The following is copied from the TaxProf Blog.
The “National Law Review” has published a list of “The 2026 Top 50 Legal Innovators in Academia,” here.
Who is a “legal innovator”? The NLR – and its sponsor, Wickard (“a specialized education and advisory firm operating at the intersection of law, artificial intelligence, ethics, and public policy”) writes: they are “educators, administrators, researchers, and academic leaders who are shaping the future of legal education. The recognition highlights individuals who are developing innovative programs, conducting impactful research, modernizing curricula, launching new centers and initiatives, and preparing students to meet the evolving demands of the legal profession.”
There was a nomination process, and a selection committee, whose members are listed in the story. Essentially everyone on the list is doing something with Generative AI or about Generative AI. That is not surprising, though it is disappointing. It is to be expected that a competition sponsored by an AI consultancy would equate “innovation” in law and legal education with “AI.”
As I usually do, I have a comment, after the jump. What is worth noticing here, and what is not?
What’s worth noticing:
I know a lot of these people personally. They are smart, hard-working, committed and often passionate researchers and teachers, and they’ve earned every bit of light that Wickard and others might shine on them. The range of seniority, experience, expertise, and “school status” represented on the list is impressive. Some of these people are long-time researchers and teachers in intellectual property law and law and technology, fields that I have been working in in different respects for 40 years. Some are deans. Some are energizer bunnies in different ways, as professors of practice, directors of centers and labs, as teachers of legal writing or lawyering skills. Some are legal education veterans; some have not even started their first full-time academic appointments.
What’s not worth noticing:
The word “innovator” and the aligned word “innovation” are doing much more work in this list than they should, or are trying to.
In Thomas Kuhn’s terms, building an AI-themed law lab or clinic, or research center or research program, or incorporating AI-relevant “skills” into a legal writing or even full first-year curriculum is “normal science.” It is what U.S. (and Canadian, and Israeli) law schools ordinarily do: they – really, individual teachers rather than schools as institutions or systems – identify “new shiny things” that are intellectually interesting and/or relevant to the evolving character of professional practice – and figure out how to attach them to their default teaching models and research expectations. None of these “top 50 innovators,” let alone any of their law schools, has identified or is advancing a Kuhn-style “paradigm shift.” They are – as individuals – “puzzle-solvers,” building incrementally on the past. Perhaps they are sophisticated, challenging, imaginative puzzle-solvers, but they are puzzle-solvers nevertheless. That characterization is hardly damning; it is the characterization that applies to almost all of the most sophisticated, challenging, and imaginative deans, faculty, and professional staff that I know across all of legal academia worldwide, whether or not they have been labeled “innovators” or “innovative.” I am, in my most optimistic and charitable moments, a puzzle-solver myself.
Perhaps Kuhn isn’t the right basis for my comment.
Turn instead, then, away from philosophy of science and toward management theory. “Innovation,” as Clayton Christensen got famous for arguing, comes in two flavors: “sustaining” innovation, and “disruptive” innovation.
From where I sit, the Wickard list is an excellent account of “sustaining” innovation. I see essentially no “disruptive” innovation. I see no systems of innovation, no fundamentally new ways of doing things or materially less expensive ways of doing the same things. I see no institutions creating environments where novelty can be explored and sorted. (The imprecise Kuhnian parallel is this: I see no people or schools wrestling with structural disconnects between prediction and observation.)
“Sustaining” innovation means “innovation intended to refine existing products for an industry’s or company’s most valuable customers,” typically aimed at preserving, protecting, and enhancing the industry’s or company’s status, standing, and market position. “Better products mean more profits,” especially in the short run. “Sustaining” keeps markets and companies essentially intact.
“Disruptive” innovation means “product and price competition by rivals that undercuts incumbents, typically by claiming a spot at the bottom of a market, either by selling lower cost products or by serving underserved customers or both.” “Disruption” changes society, markets, and companies.
Christensen’s original fame lay in his claim that if the “disruptor” gains a foothold at the “low” end, the incumbent’s rational strategy is to protect profit margins by moving up-market. The more the incumbent moves up-market, the greater the space left available for the disruptor to claim below it. A “low-end” disruptor becomes a “mid-market” rival, eventually – perhaps – squeezing the incumbent out of business entirely. (Because Christensen was a Harvard Business School professor and his theory isn’t really a theory; it is essentially a diagnosis for managers, this simple HBS summary offers a decent introduction to his parsing of the “innovation” concept.)
(An aside: I am aware, of course, that Christensen was parroting Schumpeter in many respects, that his diagnoses work far better as a set of just-so stories and cautionary tales than a prescription, and that Christensen had his critics – notably his across-the-Charles Harvard colleague, the historian Jill Lepore, in a 2014 New Yorker essay. Lepore was right to challenge Christensen’s sense that “disruption” had a general and almost inevitable logic to it, but she got a bunch of things wrong, too. She dismissed Christensen’s use of the 20th century U.S. steel industry as an example of a sector that got “disrupted” essentially out of existence by its failure to respond effectively to a novel production model. Lepore writes that Steel’s “failure is by no means a matter of historical record.” If she has ever visited Pittsburgh, she obviously got the wrong memo.)
Buy my Kuhn view or my Christensen view, or don’t. I don’t assume that I am persuasive.
But the questions prompted by those framings nag at me. Are “we” (in this case, Wickard) celebrating the wrong sorts of “innovation”? Or failing to celebrate additional right sorts of “innovation”?
In a conversation with a veteran US law dean just a week ago, I was asked: where does this all end, this AI business? The questioner continued: is there a cliff coming, a point at which the financial and training model of US law schools – still, at its core, the 1870 Harvard Law model – so fails to keep up with rapid and diverse changes to legal institutions and law practice around the world that employers simply stop hiring our students in large numbers, debt loads become unsustainable, and law schools’ parent universities stop subsidizing the schools anywhere near to the extent that subsidies are extended today?
I don’t know. But I have wondered the same thing, for a long time.
Thanks for sticking with me.