A part of Akhil Amar's interview on @TheLegalAcademy this week that resonated with me was his idea that it took him some time to figure out what he was doing with his scholarship, and after seeing it his work became more theoretically sophisticated. (Quick thread.)

As Amar tells it, his work started out with relatively narrow articles. A relative claim, to be sure. It wasn't until over time that he started to see the method that he was using; he had a particular approach to the Constitution, and his early articles were just applications.

I feel like I've had a similar evolution. As a junior prof, I had views of what ways of interpreting the law were right or wrong, but at times it felt like more of an instinctive thing. There wasn't a grand theory.

As a junior prof, I was more focused on framing new problems than on having worked out a grand theory of the answers.

In fact, I remember presenting "Searches and Seizures in A Digital World" as a lateral candidate in 2004. I was asked, "What's your general theory of the Fourth Amendment?" And I stumbled; I had no good answer. I didn't get the job. (The school was UC Berkeley, amusingly.)

It took me a series of articles to work that out, partly to show those snooty T14 professors that I could do big theory, too. "The case for the third party doctrine" in 2009 led to "Applying 4a to the Internet" in 2010. I was trying to draw equivalences, to translate rules.

And then I stared to study 4A history. And I saw judges doing that same thing that I was doing but in earlier eras with earlier technologies. I started to write an article about an example of that: How the automobile exception was a response to technological change.

But that seemed too narrow. So I decided to broaden it to write in one article on all the historical examples of that dynamic that I was seeing. And when I looked at all the examples together, I saw a common theme, what I then called "equilibrium-adjustment."

And when I was working on that article, which came out in 2011, I realized *that* was my answer to that job talk question I bombed in 2004. That was my general theory of the 4A, and it fit and explained my earlier articles.

Of course, that doesn't meany view now is right! It may be stupid & wrong. Maybe I worked from narrow articles to a stupid & wrong broader view. Either way, this path is a lot like what Amar describes. Early on, I didn't have a lot of answers. /end.