Alongside timely debates on (international) legal scholarship and the impact of generative AI on it, also hosted on this blog (e.g. here and here), I would like to share my rather personal reflections on what science communication actually means in more general terms, at least for me, and what I believe that we, as individuals, try to achieve within what is called the “legal scientific community”. On this academic journey, I want to explore the development we go through, inviting us to perhaps look back and reconsider where it all started for us.
On a personal level, my PhD journey is (hopefully) coming to an end, and I am happy (or, to use LinkedIn slang, “delighted”) to share my reflections on what I have learned about scientific research and what I perhaps have not learned yet. This experience actually precedes my time as an “official academic” and dates back to my early years as a law student.
I remember very well the first Seminararbeit (“seminar paper”) I wrote during my Bachelor’s degree. Back then, I really was puzzled about what counted as scientific research and did not know much about the basics, such as formulating a research question or properly citing academic work. This started a whole research journey into how academic work should be conducted, rather than directly asking others how to do this. I am pretty sure my work would have benefited from asking more questions back then.
What followed were many years of learning how to work “academically” and with different formats, ranging from essays to theses. What I often did not learn in the first place was how to develop the infamous “own voice”. This is something I have rather learned over the past few years and, to be quite frank, have not fully developed yet. Maybe it is the legal field as such, maybe it is me, but we tend to reiterate what others say, and, within the German context in particular, we tend to go with the herrschende Meinung (“prevailing opinion”). At least my years of experience within the international law bubble and many encounters with people with different perspectives have allowed me to move beyond the sometimes confining boundaries of legal-doctrinal thinking.
But what does developing your own voice mean anyway? And does your or my voice matter in the end? Well, I think, no matter whether it is in the end just for ourselves or for engaging with others, we should still think about what perhaps does not (yet) make sense to us. This allows us to learn, understand a little more, and engage with the world we live in. This endeavor should ideally be driven by some curiosity. And maybe we should, in this process, sometimes be more honest and make the following simple statement: I do not know, but I want to know, and this is why I do this. That is arguably still a rather self-centered approach. This is where the exchange with others comes into play. Pose these questions, discuss them with others whenever an opportunity comes along.
After this rather simplistic tale of how to develop your own voice, the question, if you work in academia, is still how to communicate it. By now, there are so many formats that you often do not know where to start. As outlined quite aptly by Jean d’Aspremont, more than a decade ago legal blogging was rather seen with suspicion. Already at the beginning of my studies, I gradually became more accustomed to the idea that blogging seemed to be a more “serious thing”, and I started citing blog posts in my academic work. Relatively soon after my “official academic” career began, I also had the great pleasure of becoming an editor for Völkerrechtsblog. This gave and continues to give me a fair share of insights into how to pose “bigger” questions, which quite frankly often emerge in the international (legal) field, and put forward ideas in a relatively short format. The blog post format allows you to do this and somehow breaks the classic conventions of legal scholarship of publishing “finished ideas”. This is what I always liked about it, and it allowed me to engage with different modes of thinking about the world and what role international law plays (and does not play) in it.
Becoming a co-host of the Völkerrechtspodcast has led me, a “writing person”, to confront different challenges. As an active listener of all kinds of podcasts, the format itself was nothing new to me, but being on the “other side” requires you to be an active participant instead of just a relatively passive listener. This is especially true when the idea is to make a topic that interests you accessible to all kinds of audiences, from law students to legal professionals and “others” who may share an interest in the topic. The mysterious “others” often remain arguably relatively undefined in the self-contained legal regime. Overall, I think what you learn in this process is not to make it even more complex than it already is. Whether this is always a successful experiment is another question.
This brings me back to another experience I actually had as a law student: one exercise in a course on academic writing was to explain your master’s thesis to “laypeople” without using legal jargon. I am pretty sure that I failed quite badly at this exercise because it felt close to impossible to explain what I was doing to people outside the legal field. Looking back on this, I still recall how I tried to explain the “relevance” of my own research during a car-sharing ride a few years ago (the other person on this ride was literally a heart surgeon). In the end, these anecdotes already tell you a lot about how we (or is it just me?) tend to be perhaps too much in our own legal world and do not necessarily make what we do accessible to “others”. Newer initiatives have emerged, at least, to counter this by also better explaining your research to different audiences, thus enhancing accessibility.
And to end with a last punchline, in a time when everything seems to be about “AI”: read, think, make mistakes, and do it again. No chatbot answer will be “perfect” either. Relying on it may drive us towards uniform ideas with allegedly no flaws. This is not to say that we should abandon it or never use it. But go back to your own thoughts and ideas. They are valuable and ready to be shared with the world – provided, of course, that they include proper citations!
Jasmin Wachau is a doctoral researcher and research fellow at the Assistant Professorship of Public International Law and International Administrative Law at the University of Erfurt. She is an Editor of Völkerrechtsblog.