This is an article about academic dishonesty, both with one’s audience and with oneself. It is about the goal of academia being advancement of knowledge and the making of a better world. To the extent other things are sought, such as external validation, the result can be a bastardization of that which we ought to be doing and perhaps making the discipline worse off deliberately or negligently.
Throughout this blog post, assume an author has written an article about pigs flying. It sounds ridiculous. But consider how an author could tantalize you with an article title like “On the Prospect of Porcine Flight: Rethinking the Impossible” or “Porcine Aviation: The Politics of the Previously Unthinkable” or “Pigs and the Potential of Porcine Bumble Bees.” Now you’ve got something to tantalize the law reviews!
Now, how to write that article as quickly and with maximum splash as possible. Let’s start with how it is all too often done:
- Misleading Title Clickbait. “Can Pigs Fly? The Truth Will Shock You!” No, it won’t, and the author’s claimed signal of excitement is misrepresentation. The asking of the question also misleads, as it suggests there is an open question worthy of an article.
- Lying About Facts. “Pigs can fly.” “I’ve seen pigs fly.” No, they don’t. And no, you have not. You may have seen an image of a pig jumping in a lake, but that isn’t flight. (Note: Michael Sowa’s famous painting is called “Köhlers Schwein mit Ente” not “flying pig.”) Making up facts is perhaps the most dangerous and self-destructive thing you can do as a scholar. It can get you fired. It could get you sued, depending on your funding and the subject of your paper. And you might be the last person to know when your sin is discovered. But worse, you do real damage to the discipline.
There are a couple of prominent examples. Francesca Gino, a professor at Harvard Business School who studied unethical behavior, was called into question for falsifying data and lost tenure. Eric Stewart at FSU similarly lost tenure for questions about data. Ward Churchill was fired at UC Boulder for making up facts as well. But his story runs deeper, as information he claimed was true about himself turned out to not be provable — namely, that he hailed from a Native American background, a claim genealogy research failed to prove and which no tribe recognized. Authors have even been accused of stealing someone else’s story as their own.
Bottom line, once you publish an article that is factually untrue, expect your scholarly reputation to tank. You might be read, you might even be published, but you won’t be trusted. And that’s the best-case scenario.
- Misstating Theory. It might be intentional, but it might be based upon the limited knowledge of the author. This happens quite a bit when an author’s sources are not original sources. Namely, the author has read what others have said about some tome but failed to read the tome itself. This happens quite often in economics, where frequently few have bothered to read Marx or Marshall but have read quite a bit by others who claimed to have read them.
Take for example someone citing an article that says, “the court in Brooks v. Foglio took judicial notice that pigs could fly, at least in theory.” And the cited article even quotes the case: “The Court thus takes judicial notice of the following facts: pigs can fly and hell has frozen over.” Brooks v. Foglio, No. CIV.A. 13-2504 JEI, 2013 WL 3354430, at *1 (D.N.J. July 2, 2013). But if you look at the case, this pigs statement is preceded with: “In what is almost certainly the first lawsuit of its kind, Plaintiff Marjorie Brooks alleges that her insurance company paid her too much money after her home was damaged by Hurricane Sandy.” So no, that doesn’t mean pigs can fly. More on this later when I write about the heroic assumptions people ignore.
- Not Citing Literature. “There is no literature that suggests pigs cannot fly.” “There are no serious studies that suggest pigs cannot fly.” These statements, flat-out ignoring literature, might impress those who publish your work, but to true scholars, you look like an idiot who has not done the most basic literature search. It is too common that authors do not realize there are other disciplines that have thought about these issues for longer, and are happy to limit their search only their own literature, where they are most comfortable.
Not engaging with literature that contests your own thinking is as anti-intellectual as it comes. This often leads to other failures, such as making heroic assumptions. And it is often based on the next sin discussed, not reading the literature.
An author might not cite literature because it disproves their theory. An author might not cite literature because they stole someone’s idea and wants to claim they came up with it on their own. Both are sins of misrepresentation.
- Not Reading Literature. Suppose the author cites a NASA study of zero gravity pigs on the International Space Station. But the author doesn’t read the paper, which reveals that the pigs aren’t flying, they are technically free falling. The fact the author has failed to read the literature shows — to those who have read the literature, although it might impress law students and other fellow travelers of the school of being an ignorant academic. By the way, “Pigs Can Fly” and “Why Pigs Must Fly” are legit articles. They just aren’t helpful here, because they are using the metaphor and are not speaking of pigs literally.
Moreover, the conditions upon which the pigs are doing the “flying” are quite limited. One does not often encounter pigs on the Space Station. And those conditions rarely hold true even under the most generous (and wrong) definition of flying.
As a corollary, reading requires thinking about the literature. That means not immediately rejecting it without first understanding the article’s perspective. Using a sports analogy: Before you attempt to score points, you should probably figure out the rules of the game and the strengths and weaknesses of the other players.
What happens in the academy is often the equivalent of what children do: Side by side or “parallel” play. Children of an immature age will play near but not with one another. “I’m building a house,” says one. “I’m drawing a house,” says another. And that’s it. This is what happens all too often in academia as well. Not even a glance over at the other professor’s house drawing or building. There is hubris in that: “What I have to say is so important that what others have couldn’t be useful” should not be a thing in academia.
Lastly, as this section was inspired by a Bluesky post of Professor Josh Sheppard at the University of Colorado, “Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it.” Be wary of citing without reading for AI reasons as well.
- Misciting Literature. Suppose the author cites a paper called “Pigs in Space: The Flight of Peppa.” Absent reading the article, the author has no idea that this is a (completely made up) children’s book. One example of my own is that I have a blog post titled “Use Racial Slurs In The Classroom!” The unscrupulous might cite me as a proponent of doing so, but even a quick glance shows that I’m dead set against it, and was mocking professors who were in favor of it.
- Making Grandiose Claims. Many of the failures to access literature can lead to grandiose claims about scholarly contributions. “My article is the first to…” No, it isn’t. Others have done similar, and the author is not narrowly defining their contribution. Making grandiose claims is easier to do with the ignorance of a poor literature search.
- Heroic Assumptions That Are Unrealistic. “Pigs could fly. That requires some evolution for the pig to grow wings. The literature has already contemplated this: Numerous images throughout history show pigs with wings.” Okay, no. First, pigs having “wings” does not mean pigs could fly. Allow me to introduce you to the “flying squirrel.” You might think, “Well, allow me to introduce YOU to the bumble bee!,” but that ignores pigs are not in the same family (let alone genus) as pigs (look up bumble bees, flight vortex, and Bernoulli’s principle). Second, you’ve only accounted for lift, not weight, thrust, and drag. Third, there is no realistic evolutionary progression that allows for pigs to have wings. In short, no matter how complex your argument, it is bullshit. And often, laying it on thick with verbose text creates the ruse of intelligent thought. But it’s still bullshit.
Heroic assumptions often happens in economics, too. People will speak of how easy it is to assume a zero-income effect. But there’s enough literature out there (if you read it) to recognize if you do this you are assuming a spherical cow. Law reviews might buy it, but you are not furthering knowledge.
- Asskiss Cites. These are cites designed to sway people who are big names in your field, but do not include the other folks who have written on it. And just dropping those names without engaging in the flaws or weaknesses of their theories clearly demonstrates you are citing them for the same reason a monkey holds a lightbulb — not for illumination!
One of the reasons this is problematic is that someone’s reputation is not an argument. “I know this person and they are famous and therefore are correct” is anti-intellectual: Many famous people are often wrong, and there is no law professor exceptionalism. Have doubts? Look up how many famous law professors made very bad COVID-19 predictions.
And, merely because someone has become famous does not mean that the quality of their work is consistent throughout time or subject matter. Whether the work trends upward or downward (“reputational enshittification?” — sorry, Cory Doctorow) depends on an appraisal of the work, not the person.
- Sacrificing Accuracy For Speed. Doing scholarship correctly takes time. I’m grateful to Professor Anthony Kreis at Georgia State for observing the “hurry up” problem. Often, doing scholarship (and legislation, for that matter) right runs contrary to the desires of those who seek to make the world a worse place. Sloppy is fast and potentially popular and done right may not come in time to undo the damage. But it is invaluable to criticize that which is not done right, whether it is flawed assumptions, completely made-up facts, improper historical analysis, flawed methodologies, or other things that detract from the purposes of scholarship.
Hey, did you notice none of these long-standing sins have much to do with AI? I mean, they could, but the problem is more enduring and more human.
Maybe I should have written this column in … Pig Latin.
LawProfBlawg is an anonymous law professor. Follow him on X/Twitter/whatever (@lawprofblawg). He’s also on BlueSky, Mastodon, and Threads depending on his mood. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com. The views of this blog post do not represent the views of his employer, his employer’s government, his Dean, his colleagues, his family, or himself.
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