‘Tis Too Much Proved

Diary Entry: October 17, 2024

The feedback from my JSD seminar professor finally materialized today. My review of Judicial Regrets — Yuvraj Josh’s draft paper on the curious phenomenon of judicial remorse and its potential to retroactively color outcomes — was returned. It was a sea of red ink, the entire manuscript scored and scarred by her corrections. Buried within the wreckage, however, was her assessment: I am, apparently, a “terrific writer.” A classic academic benediction. While it certainly proves that even the “terrific” possess a cavernous capacity for improvement, I find the simple fact of the anointment to be, much to my own surprise, genuinely fortifying.

A second, entirely unrelated, but equally exhilarating development followed. An email from Professor Pigou, landing in my inbox with the quiet shock of something long overdue, finally appeared. His request: draft a sample email for him to circulate among his students, soliciting their participation in our empirical project.

This is the climate change study our small cohort of three JSD students initiated, technically headed by Professor Lawless — a close friend of Pigou’s. It’s a fascinating endeavor, and I harbor ambitions to scale it significantly, transforming our meager sample of 15 into a respectable 200, perhaps more. This whole subplot began on October 8, when a fellow JSD student offered the excellent suggestion of asking Pigou to mediate on our behalf, tapping his own students as potential participants. I promptly devised a comprehensive email detailing the request.

His initial reply was breezy: “sure, let me know what I need to do.” But when I articulated the specific, and indeed only, thing we needed — for him to simply ask his students — he recoiled. To my surprise, he declared he would not devote a single moment of class time to a survey. This, he reminded me, was a college of law, where every second must be dedicated to the “sacred endeavor of studying the law.” A fine piece of pulpitry, especially since we never dreamed of wasting our colleagues’ time on what might seem a useless exercise from their perspective. A simple email forward would have sufficed.

And so today, after nearly ten full days of silence on the matter, Professor Pigou resurfaced. He has conceded: if we devise the sample email, he will circulate it.

I drafted and dispatched it instantly. Let us see what, if anything, comes of it.