The blogging mindset and the compulsion to "show your work"

I honestly don't remember whether it was in grade school, junior high, or high school that I first had math teachers who insisted that my written homework assignments, in addition to reporting the problems' answers, also "show my work" — the calculations I'd done in support of the solution I was offering up.  Most students chafe at such requirements, and I suppose that I did as well.  I certainly took no perverse joy in the English composition assignments that were intended to familiarize me with writing footnotes and bibliographies either.

Law school and, in particular, law review, and then a subsequent judicial clerkship, however, added heavy paving stones to the neural pathways that now affect all my writing.  For better or worse (or actually, for better sometimes and other times for worse), "showing my work" — in the form of footnotes and legal citations — became the rule for my professional writing, rather than the exception.  The best send-up of this widespread compulsion is a fabulous student-written note from the Penn Law Review in 1975 entitled "The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule," which famously begins with its first word — "The" — footnoted and defined.

The compulsion carries over quite naturally to my blogging.  Writing the paragraph just above, for example, I agonized briefly over whether to use standard "Bluebook" citation form to reference that article, and I lamented the fact that (as best I can determine) there's no online version of it available.  The latter fact particularly frustrates my law-blogging instincts — "Argh! I can't hyperlink this!"

The instinct to "show your work" — to provide footnotes, references, hyperlinks, bibliographies, exhibit volumes, etc. — is bound up closely with the craving for both accuracy and credibility.  An illustrative anecdote:

The Fifth Circuit judge for whom I had the privilege of working was then in only her second year on the bench, and she had come from a nontraditional practice specialty (corporate securities regulation).  She hadn't dealt at all, since her own law school days, with many of the subjects (for example, criminal law) on which she and our chambers were now required to write appellate opinions on a daily basis.  She was therefore quite insistent that in drafting proposed opinions for her review and revision, her clerks "show their work" with promiscuous citations to relevant statutes, judicial opinions, and the record from the district court.  And woe be it to the clerk in our chambers who ever assumed that he could rely upon the parties' briefs to have identified all of the relevant legal precedents!  We used the parties' briefs as a starting point for our own research, and our judge expected us to be highly skeptical not only of the parties' contentions, but also of their research and briefing.  Her insistence that we do independent research, and always show our work, was an important quality-control method, and it also probably reassured her more experienced colleagues on the bench that the written opinions in which they were being asked to concur were sound. 

By contrast, one of my law school classmates who worked for a long-time Fifth Circuit judge described to me his boss' frequent and amazing practice of dictating even very important written opinions from off the top of his head — citing as precedent mostly his own prior decisions from years past.  My classmate's job often consisted of simply locating the volume and page citations from those past opinions to polish up his chambers' output for publication.

Recently, a friend suggested that I write an op-ed for the newspaper where he works.  I was flattered by the suggestion, and ended up begging off because of other commitments.  But I said to him, only half jokingly, that I didn't know whether I'd be able to write an op-ed without hyperlinks.  I suppose that what I really meant was, "I'm not sure anyone would take me seriously unless I've shown my work."  I almost certainly let my compulsion get out of control in lots of my blogging.  For instance, in writing a brief review of a brief book review last night, when I asserted that I knew something about book reviews, I included a good half dozen hyperlinks to back up that assertion, including one to the law review masthead from 24 years ago to prove that I've been a book review editor.  How incredibly anal that was!  But the odd fact is, I'm uncomfortable writing a blog post — like this one — without hyperlinks.