Ask a Professor

Submit a question you'd like me to explore in my new Ask a Professor series.

Having been a professor for more than twenty-five years, I’m accustomed to a steady stream of questions—often wide-ranging ones—and to doing my best to answer as many of them as I can.

Some of those questions are about substance: the material itself, the arguments, the ideas. On this Substack, that means questions about anything I’m writing, anything I’m thinking about, or anything you’re thinking about that touches on law, politics, power, and intellectual or cultural public life.

But many of the questions I’ve received over the years are about something else entirely: they fall into what you might call the zone of mentorship. People want to know how to shape a career, how to make difficult decisions, how to evaluate tradeoffs, and how to think clearly about the lives they’re trying to build. Often they’re not only looking for advice about what to do, but for guidance about how to think: what habits, methods, or frameworks might help them design a career, a job, or a life that reflects their values.

Over time, I’ve come to really enjoy this part of the work. I like attempting to understand someone’s situation, clarify what’s at stake, and offer a perspective that might be genuinely helpful. A good solution points people in a direction they actually want to go, and helps them strategize to get there. I’ve learned, in the process, that questions can be consequential in ways we don’t always anticipate. I even met my wife because she once called me to ask a very large question: What is the meaning of life?

So I’m experimenting with a series I’m calling Ask a Professor.

The idea is simple: you ask questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them. To make that invitation more concrete, here are some of the kinds of questions you might ask … though I’m sure you’ll come up with others I haven’t anticipated:

• Law, courts, and power: constitutional interpretation, free speech, democracy, religion and law, and how legal institutions actually function in practice

• Arguments and ideas: mine, someone else’s, or your own, those that you want to understand better, test, or think through more carefully

• Careers and callings: how to choose among them, how to change course, and how to think seriously about work, ambition and purpose

• Decision-making under uncertainty: how to weigh tradeoffs and architect strategic choices

• Mentorship and advice: how to find mentors, how to keep them, how to know when to let them go

• Meaning, responsibility, and moral discomfort: including doubt, ambiguity, and the limits of what law (or expertise) can resolve

• Style, appearance, and presence: including men’s fashion, particularly professional dress, and how what we wear shapes how we’re perceived and how we see ourselves

• Life Questions: a specific dilemma, crossroads, or moment in your life around which you’d like advice or a new perspective

I love substance, and I’ll always try to answer substantive questions directly and seriously. But you don’t need to restrict yourself to “substantive” questions.

And don’t hesitate to be personal. (Please specify exactly what you’re comfortable with me sharing with the world, though. I am happy to redact names or specifics, but otherwise will quote or paraphrase your question while answering it.) Questions that begin with particular situations usually turn out to have the most value for other people. If you’re wondering about something, chances are many other people are too. I find that frequently these sorts of queries give rise to new ideas for newsletters and videos, for which I’m especially grateful.

This should be fun, and it’s an experiment.

Go for it.