Episode 108 - Genevieve Lakier: "Decision-making is a result of gut instincts."

Professor Genevieve Lakier, from the University of Chicago Law School, teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the legislatures' role in safeguarding free speech values, and the fight over freedom of speech on social media platforms. Professor Lakier talks about her circuitous career path and how she found her niche in the First Amendment and became a University of Chicago law professor.

Transcript

Lee 00:41
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host today, Lee, and I'm speaking with Professor Genevieve Lakier from the University of Chicago Law School. She teaches and writes about freedom of speech and American constitutional law. Her work examines the changing meaning of freedom of speech in the United States, the role that legislatures play and the fight over freedom of speech on social media platforms.

Professor Lakier is here to talk to us about her career path and how she became a University of Chicago professor.

Welcome to The Course, Professor Genevieve Lakier it is a pleasure to have you with us today. 

Genevieve Lakier 00:41
Oh, that's nice to be here.

Lee 00:42
So Genevieve, can you give me a general overview of your career path?

Let's start in your undergrad college years, and then take me all the way to your current role at the university.

Genevieve Lakier 00:54
Okay. Well, warning though. It's a very circuitous route. I always tell people who ask me I'm the go to person. If you want an example of someone whose career path was not direct by any means. So, when I was an undergraduate, I went to college thinking I would become a mathematician. I chose my university, my college, because it was very good in math and then was at college for one semester and realized I didn't want to become a mathematician and happened to take an anthropology, undergrad Intro to Anthropology, a course, and loved it.

Love the idea that there was this whole discipline, that was devoted to trying to figure out how humans make meaning and how meaning and understanding the world can change depending on the culture and history out of which you come. And so, quickly change my focus to become an anthropology major undergraduate.

And I think already by the time I was a sophomore junior in college. I knew I wanted to be an academic it was just apparent to me that I love thinking about ideas. I loved writing. I was very serious about that. I love the university environment. I think I knew that this was the kind of person I was. 

And so, I thought, okay, I love anthropology. I want to be an academic. I should get a PhD in anthropology. So, when I graduated from college, I took a year, and I taught English in Vietnam as English as a second language in Vietnam, and then applied to grad school. And was very lucky to get into the University of Chicago anthropology program, PhD program, which is really one of the best in the country.

And, my brother went to the University of Chicago, my family's in Chicago, so it was a pretty easy choice to come to the University of Chicago, and I did my graduate work. And I loved it. I love the sort of dense theoretical inquiry. I like the challenge of learning a new language. I learned Nepali.

I thought it was all very interesting, but the thing about anthropology is that particularly, I guess the last 4 or 5 decades since the decolonization movement, since the sort of wave of decolonization, anthropology has become a pretty emphatically anti normative discipline, meaning anthropologists are taught and understand themselves to have the duty to bear witness, to explain, to uncover, but not to prescribe. The whole point of anthropology is that there is no fixed space of neutrality from which you can come up with, you know, this is right and this is wrong kinds of judgments, normative judgments. 

And so the task of the anthropologist is to try and explain, to make sense of, to translate, but not to say, well, this society, this culture, this people, this community is doing things, this right and this wrong, but my field work was in, coming to in Nepal and I was working with student activists and the topic, I was a legal anthropologist, and the topic was about corruption and failure of rule of law and how that operated in Nepal and what were the conditions under which people in Nepal were, for example, taking to the streets, engaging in these very frequent general strikes called bandha in order to make political claims, in order to demand services from the state, rather than through ordinary bureaucratic processes.

And, you know, there are lots of good reason. There are lots of reasons why this is the way often, particularly, youth feel like they, that's the only way they can get things done. But I was working on these, you know, pretty difficult problems for people in Nepal and they kept saying to me, h, we're so glad you're studying this. People from America don't really spend that much time studying things like these political strikes. And you're going to make recommendations about what we can do to change it. 

And I wasn't, that was not the point of what I was doing. I was trying to understand the meaning, the ritual, the context, and the history under which these performances occurred and the broader social framework, but I wasn't going to make any normative suggestions. And I also knew that despite all the work I was putting into this dissertation and what I presumed eventually was going to be a book, because it was going to be densely theoretical in very complex language, the readership was going to be very small.

So, I was putting all this work in and also, I think part of it was getting all of this cooperation, which I was very grateful for, from all these people who would sit down with me for hours to tell me about themselves and their aspirations and their politics and their, you know, how they went about their practice of trying to bring change or become student president or whatever it was. And they were giving me all this and I was going to give them very little in return. And so, I started to have real doubts about whether this was the path I wanted to pursue. And luckily, I was in Nepal on a Fulbright with, and there was another American on a Fulbright there who was a legal academic.

And I really never before considered the possibility of legal academia. I think, I don't know why, for whatever reason, I understood Law to be, purely a profession, I was interested in theory, it just seemed, you know, irrelevant to me. But she was studying relatively similar kinds of questions, just in a slightly different vein. But law is a emphatically normative discipline, it's all about making prescriptions, trying to figure out how to change the law, the rules and the doctrine and the institutions and so I started thinking, this is perhaps a better route.

And so, it took a while because by the time you're at the stage of writing your dissertation, defending your dissertation, there's a lot of sunk costs. You've spent time going to grad school, for me, learning the language, spending two years in Nepal, writing the dissertation. You're old, you're tired. I wasn't sure whether I had the stomach to go back to grad school and start all over again.

So, I decided that I was going to go on the anthropology teaching market, and I was going to apply to law school, same time, same year. And if I got an anthropology job, I should just take it. That was the thing I've been aiming for years and years and years. It would be good. I would have freedom and time to pursue a research agenda to teach students, which I wanted to do.

And if I didn't and I got into law school, well then I should do that. but luckily or unluckily, I happened to get a job, a good job, in Chicago and also get a scholarship to NYU law school, which is good law school. And I had essentially a week to decide between these two very different paths. And although I had said earlier that if I got an answer job, I would take it.

I really wanted to go to law school, which was surprising and interesting to me. I mean, I think one of the things my story reveals for good or for ill, is how much decision making was a result of sort of gut instincts that, you know, ultimately I hemmed in a hard I worked on the long pros and cons list that week where I was trying to decide between these two alternatives. But ultimately I just, I decided I turned down the job, which is quite hard and painful to do, I decided to go to law school because in my gut, I felt like that was the thing to do, and I never, ever regretted it. 

And so I went to NYU law school, but also with the idea of being an academic and then, eventually, graduate from law school, and then I clerked for 2 years. I wanted to clerk for federal judges because I thought it would be good experience. And it's not that dissimilar from the job of an academic. You're researching questions as particularly at the appellate level and you're writing memos. 

And so, I did that for two years. I clerked for a district court judge and then an appeals court judge and then I applied for legal fellowships, which are these one or two year positions where you're teaching legal writing sort of intro stuff to law students, but also you have time to work on scholarship and to go out on the job market. And again, I was lucky enough, very lucky, to get a fellowship at the University of Chicago. I think really the best legal fellowship there is in the country. It's called the Bigelow Fellowship. 

And at this point I was, you know, I was kind of a weird legal academic. I had a PhD in anthropology. I knew Nepali, but I was working on the first amendment. It was kind of a mishmash of things. It's not what is recommended, which is that if you're going to do a PhD and a JD at the same time, you figure out a way to make them work seamlessly together. So, you are a coherent package.

I was not. I was someone who had really taken the windy path. And so, when I was at the fellowship, I felt very lucky to be there. I enjoyed it. I was learning a lot. I was happy with my writing, but I thought I will not, you know, I will have limited career choices, job choices, and I should just take whatever I get. 

And so, I went on the job market and it had its ups and downs, but ultimately the law school, the University of Chicago law school offered me a job, which was not at all what I predicted and I could not turn them down. And so, I became a law professor there and ultimately got tenured and now I'm a full professor of law.

Lee 09:17 
So tell me about your particular focus as a law professor. You are very interested in issues around the 1st amendment.

Genevieve Lakier 09:26
So I am, I think of myself these days more as a scholar of freedom of speech because I work on the First Amendment speech clause, the guarantee of freedom of speech in the First Amendment, and then what I call non First Amendment - Free speech law. So the statutes and other regulations that guarantee freedom of speech, but do so through non constitutional means. And I am, I think, one of a new generation of first amendment scholars who are questioning whether the established rules are the right ones.

I think the, you know, the First Amendment right now is this incredibly important engine of constitutional litigation and argument and rights protection in the United States. It's one of the most powerful of all the amendment Bill of Rights right now. Court litigants invoke it a lot. Courts use it to strike down all sorts of  laws and regulations but its meaning is incredibly contested. And I think in the United States, it's, you know, our, the national commitment to freedom of speech is one of the things people are proud of and identify very strongly as kind of characteristic American virtue, but what it means to guarantee freedom of speech is a matter of debate.

People of different political stripes and backgrounds and judges of different political stripes and backgrounds will have very different views about what it requires, what it means, and the text itself doesn't make that plain. And so, I study these conflicts over the meaning, how it has evolved over time. And then right now, these incredibly important questions about given all that, how does that apply? What does that mean for the regulation of social media?

Lee 11:02
I want to talk a little bit about the support that you received as you were figuring this out for yourself. Who did you lean on for that support?

Genevieve Lakier 11:10
My family, really, my parents were quite supportive. I think a little bit relieved, I was not going to become an anthropologist because it's, you know, it's a hard profession. You don't get paid as much as you do in law and so they were very supportive through much of it. And my friends, you know, it's really helpful to have people in your life who can, who both really understand you and support you and love you no matter what the decision you make is, but also not afraid to say they disagree.

My very good friend at the time, this is the legal academic, I met when I was on the Fulbright. You know, she walked with me when I was making this decision to turn down the job in anthropology and go to law school, and I think would never have made that same decision. But was really respected, the fact that this was my decision but wanted me to make sure it was what I thought and what I wanted. And so just to have a sounding board, both to check that you're not being crazy. But also to give you, the support and the courage that it's okay to try and I will be here if it doesn't work.

Ultimately, I think one of the lessons I learned from that experience was that this had to be my decision that it's, you know, what the support of those who love you can give you, is the courage to make up your mind for yourself, but it's still ultimately it's your decision. And so I think on the one hand, it made me feel like very lucky to have people to work through and to get kind of obsessive about these questions.

I think it, when you're trying to make these career decisions, some of them, they're so meaningful. There are these decision points in your life, which can really alter the entire course of your, of your life. And you should have, and you should demand the generosity from others that they can help you work through these decisions in due time.

Like it took a while. I spent, you know, that entire week where I was trying to wrestle with the decision, just wrestling with the decision. It took a long time for me to figure it out. And my family and my friends were there to help me work through, it wasn't easy, But also, ultimately, it is your decision to make and you have to take responsibility for it and you have to go with what you think is best. 

And one of the things that was hard was that I think most people in my life thought I made the wrong decision when I chose to go to law school, I turned down the bird in the hand to get to try and do this very uncertain thing. But it was what I wanted to do. And so, if you feel very strongly that this is what you should be doing, I think part of what the job of the people who love you and support you is, is to say, okay, okay, we wouldn't do this, but we respect that you want to. 

Lee 14:02
So, Genevieve, you've hinted at this earlier in our conversation, but why did you want to be an academic rather than, you know, the other ways that you can practice law?

Genevieve Lakier 14:15
You know, well, I guess two reasons. One is that I love ideas and I love writing and I love shaping ideas and I want to have the freedom to ask the questions I wanted to ask rather than the questions that came up to me through whatever the needs of a particular client was. And I also wanted the chance to put things together in a kind of systematic way.

A lot of what my work involves is trying to bring together a lot of different sub areas of free speech law, First Amendment law, to try and figure out how it makes sense together. And that's hard to do as a practicing litigator. I will not lie. Like there were moments in law school when I thought, oh, my gosh, it would be amazing to be a public lawyer or to do free speech law as a litigator.

And I think one of the great virtues or pros of being a legal academic is that you can actually do practice on the side, or you can consult the boundary between academia and the rest of the world. The profession is not nearly as firm as it is in other arenas. So, there's a lot of movement between and among. But I knew that there was something about the freedom of being an academic that I really wanted.

And then also I wanted to teach. I love teaching it's very satisfying and it's also its own intellectual challenge to figure out. That's, you know, really complicated, esoteric, subtle, maybe just confusing and inconsistent, body of cases or regulations. How do you present that in a way that students can understand what's going on?

And also, you know, not just that you dumb it down, you simplify it, but that they can understand both what's clear and what's not clear. They can really get a sense of what's happening here in all of its complexity and difficulty, without themselves being overwhelmed. And I really do like that challenge and I love the experience of teaching students and then they, and feeling like by the end of the quarter, they have so much more of an understanding of this thing that in the beginning of the quarter they were completely stumped by.

Lee 16:07
So on that note, Genevieve, tell me about what are the most fun parts of your job.

Genevieve Lakier 16:13
Okay, the most fun parts of my job are, I think, when you've written a paper that you like, and you're presenting it at a workshop, and you get to talk to other academics about ideas that you've worked through, that you believe in, that you think are really interesting, and they're, you know, asking these difficult questions, and they've read your, it's this sort of playful, intimate, collective intellectual experience that can be so wonderful.

Because your colleagues can help you figure out what you're saying better than you understood on your own. It can feel wonderful. And also, there's the challenge of it, and it can be funny and fun. That's one of the great pleasures of my job and also reading work by other academics that you think is wonderful. That's great. 

Getting to be around, and this is true of both the other faculty and the students, getting to be around really smart, interesting people all the time. I do not take that for granted. I try not to take that for granted because it's just a real pleasure to be around people who are just thinking and saying interesting things.

Lee 17:12
And then Genevieve, I'm interested in when and how you discovered your particular interest in free speech.

Genevieve Lakie 17:18
A good question. So my dissertation was about protest, and symbolic expression. And so it was clearly interested in speech and speech related questions. And a lot of anthropology is I was interested in sort of performance theory and formatively, and a lot of that is about the communication of symbolic meaning, or how the use of symbols and words can create meaning as well as reflected.

And so there was a way in which I was always kind of interested, but you know, what's so interesting is when I went to law school, I took first amendment law. And I took it with Geoffrey Stone, who's now my colleague at the University of Chicago and has been a mentor and a friend to me for a while. And I feel very lucky for that.

But I remember, you know, I've done all this anthro theory and, semiotic theory about language, and I took first amendment law, and I thought, oh, my God, this is so crude, in part because it's just it was speaking a different language. It was doing doctrine. It wasn't trying to do social theory.

And so, at first, I did not like first amendment law, and I thought, oh, no, I'm definitely not going to do this. But in the last year of law school, I ended up, as an assistant on a case that one of my professors was working on and the case happened to implicate First Amendment issues that I think I discovered.

I discovered that there was a First Amendment issue kind of hiding in the case and then went down a rabbit's hole exploring the case law for dealing with this issue. And thought it was both really fascinating and also that I had something to add precisely because the courts were not relying on social, they were not social theorists, they didn't have a good understanding of how language actually operated.

And so, when you're trying to write about, make rules for the regulation of speech, when you don't really understand what's going on, it can lead to poor rulemaking. And so, I had this moment where I thought, wow, my anthro training, my social theory background, it could be very useful when trying to analyze these questions.

And that made it very interesting to me and as I came to learn more and more about free speech law and the first amendment and the sort of the democratic and liberal values that it's trying to instantiate, I just came to like it more and more. 

I have a T shirt that says first amendment addict. Because I keep saying I'm going to move outside, you know, I'm going to think about other things than freedom of speech. I'm going to work on other kinds of liberal rights, but it's a universe. There's so much, there's so many different arenas, kinds of speech regulatory questions that are, that implicate the first amendment and freedom of speech. And I just cannot quit it as I learn more about it, I find it more and more fascinating.

Lee 19:38
So Genevieve, what advice would you have for someone who is interested in becoming a law professor?

Genevieve Lakier 19:45
I would say, well, I guess I have two buckets of advice for people who are interested in becoming law professors. There's one focusing on the law. One focused on the professor. 

So, for people who are interested in becoming academics in general, I would say it's a wonderful job. It gives you a lot of freedom. It's very stimulating and challenging and also you just have so much autonomy to figure out what it is you want to write about and think about. But for precisely that reason, it also can be a very difficult job. You are, you have to be an entrepreneur. You have to figure out your path. You have to figure out what you're going to be writing about. And so I think it can work very well for certain kinds of people and very poorly for other kinds of people. 

And so, for those who are thinking about becoming professors, I think the number one question you have to ask is: are you good at coming up with ideas? And executing on those ideas? Because that is the primary job of an academic. You have to come up with paper ideas. They have to be reasonable ideas. And then you have to be able to make something of them. And of course, you know, you're just starting out you don't want to, have too high a standard for what you're supposed to be producing.

You know, when I started out, I had the sense that I had ideas, but I wasn't sure exactly how to write a legal article and, you know, it's absolutely not the case that before you start out, you should know all the answers. But you should be someone who is generative in that way, I think, and this is true for any branch of academia. I think the, there's a qualitative kind of intellect that works well in academia. And that is this person who's good at identifying interesting and important ideas and then writing about them or arguments. 

And then to become a law professor I think it is right now, the typical route, is to either get a PhD or to clerk, maybe have some practice experience, and go to a fellow and or go to a fellowship snd those are very different parts. They're both good. But for those who want to be legal academics, I suppose I would suggest, getting a sense of what area of law you want to work in and what your distinctive contribution could be 

And then figuring out a way to build a sort of a pathway where you can get experience or insight into that area such that you can come up with an interesting job talk paper and a research agenda.

You know, really, when you're a legal academic, you want to feel like you're doing, you're providing a thing. You're bringing a perspective that is not already replicated on the market. And so, the, you know, of course, there are areas, the first amendment, there's lots of people working in the first amendment, but I'm working in a range of papers and styles that I think are pretty unique to me.

And so, you want to try and figure out what your niche is going to be. I think that's very helpful on the job market, but also more generally, I think it just, it makes it simpler and easier to understand what role you're playing in this sort of broader conversation.

Lee 22:29
And then finally, Genevieve, what is it about your job that you find most fulfilling and gratifying?

Genevieve Lakier 22:37
Teaching students. And I know that sounds like a PR answer, but it is really genuinely the case. It is sometimes emotional, sometimes tiring to teach. it takes an enormous amount of labor on my part preparing for class. And then the performance of class is tiring, and then there's office hours and students email you, right? It all takes a lot of time and effort but it can be so fulfilling when you feel like you've really helped students understand something they look up to didn't understand before. 

I love writing papers. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, one of the funnest parts about the job is workshopping papers and having people engage with your ideas. Love that all. But the benefit to the world is very unclear or attenuated. Maybe those papers will change how judges think about things. Maybe those papers will help us understand something better so that we can do something different in the future. Maybe, maybe, maybe, but maybe not. You know, maybe who knows.

But when you teach students, you get immediate payoffs. Right. You now have communicated knowledge to this other person and they can now communicate the knowledge to others. And they understand something about the world that they didn't understand before, and they can use it. And that is so gratifying, both on a personal level to feel like you've helped this person, but also it just means that you've done good in the world, you've added to the stock of knowledge and I find it incredibly gratifying.

Lee 23:50
Thank you, Professor Genevieve Lakier, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed listening to today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family.

You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.