Jeffrey Stempel

What's the most important thing you are working on right now?

I recoil a little bit at this question. Although it’s important to try to prioritize and categorize your work, I think it’s closer to the truth to say that we can’t predict the impact of the books, articles, or talks we work on as professors. 

One example. When the Law School first started, I attended my first State Bar of Nevada Annual Meeting and participated in a program on construction defect litigation, which I really had not known much about until moving here. It got me motivated to add a new section on the issue to my insurance treatise. The section was favorably cited by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on a question that was relatively unsettled at the time and the decision (which was in accord with my analysis in the treatise) had influence on other courts. Now, the precedent on the issue is pretty much in accord with the treatise analysis. 

So this is but one example of something I didn’t initially think of as “important” but turned into something where my writing actually has some impact in the real world, on an issue affecting hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of people – which is about the best you can hope for when writing something. But it started by participating in a panel program that, while I enjoyed, was not something I initially regarded a major project.

Does that mean everything you do – or any law professor does – is a shot in the dark?

Not exactly, but there’s an aspect of unpredictability whenever you do research and writing. I think of it as similar to the distinction between “pure” and “applied” research, which is better known in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) disciplines. But law, even though it is something of a “liberal arts” discipline, has aspects of both pure and applied research. 

Sometimes legal scholarship is like directed hard science research. You might be criticizing a judicial opinion or statute with the express hope that the case will be reversed or the law amended or repealed. Other times, you’re exploring an issue because you just want to find out more about it, understand it, or clarify it. This is similar to something like a scientist in the lab trying to locate a particular gene or explain a decrease in insect population. The research may or may not be picked up by others and may or may not result in changes in doctrine or policy. You just can’t predict.

Does that bother you?

Not at all – except to the extent that it can be frustrating that this is not well understood among the general public and is sometimes exploited by critics of education who want to see fewer resources devoted to scholarship or only to scholarship that is more self-consciously directed at tangible results. Because things are unpredictable, scholars need a certain freedom to spend time on things that may or may not pan out. That goes for legal research as well as for lab work.

That said, what is the most important thing you’re working on right now?

I’ve got roughly a half-dozen articles or treatise chapters in various stages of completion. I hope the manuscript arguing for a more comprehensive approach to construing insurance policies (and contracts generally) will get noticed when published. But it might not get much attention. Instead it might be the forthcoming paper on insuring cyber risks or the one about sanctions for discovery violations in civil litigation. Maybe all of them will go unnoticed in terms of the reactions of other scholars, courts, lawyers, and policymakers. But maybe one will deemed be useful and have a positive impact. Not every project is a hit, but that doesn’t mean you don’t keep trying.