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41 San Diego L. Rev. 1783 (2004)
Writing Highs and Lows

handle is hein.journals/sanlr41 and id is 1795 raw text is: Writing Highs and Lows KIMBERLY A. YURACKO* Why we as academics write is an interesting question. It is certainly one my mother asks, sometimes quietly to herself and sometimes out loud, when I coax her into reading some new article I have written. When I think about why I write, not feeling comfortable to speak for academics generally, I envision a kind of hierarchy of motivations. I write for high reasons and low reasons. These are vaguely moralistic labels. To me, the high reasons seem more noble and pure than the low reasons. The low reasons are at times, though, quite compelling. Let me start with my high reasons for writing and work my way down. One reason I write is to try to change the way people think about issues and to become part of a public debate. In this sense, writing is a political activity. The goal is to advocate for social changes that will make society more just and encourage people to live more satisfying and rewarding lives. This was probably my dominant reason for writing when I was in graduate school. I wrote a dissertation arguing that feminists who were concerned about substantive sex equality needed to focus on why women and men continued to make very different life choices and to structure and prioritize their lives so differently. I argued that feminists were right to be critical of certain types of choices women made but that they could not justify their criticisms using only liberal process-based arguments. I argued that feminists needed to move beyond liberal value * Assistant Professor, Northwestern University School of Law. This Paper was presented at the Scholarship Panel on Why We Write: Motivations for Legal Scholarship at the 2004 AALS Annual Meeting. I thank Emily Sherwin for inviting me to participate in this panel, and I thank my co-panelists Ted Eisenberg, Yale Kamisar, Jonathan Macey, and Steven Smith for sparking a lively discussion. 1783

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