I also use my essay as a proof concept for my current long-term project on the impact, pragmatics and relevance of legal scholarship. What might Desai's book _do_? What effects might it have? What does it afford to readers?
![implicit and explicit answers. Debates over methods tend to assess approaches against a
criterion of contribution to knowledge in the abstract (explanation, understanding, ‘analys[ing] the ideas, values, and commitments of the community’). Legal research is forcefully shaped by concerns of use and usefulness: it can furnish lawyers and legal officials with a clear view of what the law is or compelling arguments about what it should be, whence recurring laments that it fails to do so. In civil law systems and beyond, producing doctrine can cleave closely to lawmaking per se. Critical legal thought has long been practiceoriented in a different mode, cognisant that legal research might operate to transform the contexts in which law operates—or as ideology, underwriting unjust power. In a broader view, if legal scholarship maintains law as a social practice, then the light law and society research sheds on ‘what law does’ implicates not just lawyers and officials, but academics too.
There is more. Publishing scholarship has various implications for the professional status or personal life of its authors. Legal scholarship is thus not only law-making but also field-making. To engage in scholarship, moreover, involves not only reading sources but acting on them as well. To a significant degree, the method of legal research is writing, and writing is (a mode of) thinking. Crafting scholarship thus has the potential to transform not only readers but also authors.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5pjg2eunftajrebw6bxtq44g/bafkreigloihqzxtna72j7c3bdekn3w74mbgyeqz5pdarwlvofbsedbr5hu)
Liam McHugh-Russell
@xntl.info
2.7K followers 1.8K following 3.5K posts
A volatile simian nervous system, ominously new to the planet. Canadian law professor. Transnational law, labour regulation, cooperatives and corporate governance, knowledge politics. Currently obsessed with the uses of legal scholarship. Two time dad.
![posing ignorance in quasi-Hegelian terms, as a ‘formless’, ‘blank’ absence, makes it easy to portray expert ignorance not only as a state of doubt, humility or uncertainty—not only an experience of ‘anxiety, resignation, [or] subversion’—but as a wholesale disavowal of expertise: a ‘systematic’ denial both of knowledge and of self qua expert or professional.
It is, lastly, the operation of such self-denying expertise that grounds Desai’s assessment
that existing modes of critical analysis are inadequate to understanding expert ignorance, justifying his own methodological innovations.
How else might we approach the relationship between ignorance and expertise? Annelise Riles’ work on legal amateurism offers one alternative. Riles describes legal amateurism as an expression of the ‘aesthetic, performative and relational dimensions’ of modern legal thought. It is resistant to aspects of professionalism grounded in modernist
appeals to well-defined ends, rigorous, scientific certainty about means, and rational action](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5pjg2eunftajrebw6bxtq44g/bafkreibpsq7zpdcbso2e6symgidsbx6qcgupzuit2gmp62lym54lbyor5e)
![Exert Ignorance is staged as a rejoinder to a tradition of scholarship that aims to expose
and critique the role of expertise in various global governance projects and in mediating
conflicts among them.19 While this critical literature has addressed various topics, Desai’s book, like the earliest contributions, concerns international development.
Like Hamlet’s caution—’[t]here are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are
dreamt of in your philosophy’—this tradition has sought first to expose how expert
knowledge fails to grasp the particular: effacing nuance, neglecting context, occluding contingency and forgetting history. And since development knowledge is not just expanded
but deployed in various sites of governance, this scholarship traces how those epistemic
gaps translate into various modes of failure, from waste on projects that do not ‘take’, to
illegitimate rule, to profound atrocity.
Desai charges this tradition with a faulty view of how knowledge (qua epistemic resource) relates to expertise (qua social role). The problem, he proposes, follows from setting up the expert as someone who ‘tr[ies] to produce more or less authoritative maps … and interpretive frameworks … in order to guide action’. It tends to hypostatise the](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5pjg2eunftajrebw6bxtq44g/bafkreihxteb6zxhf5aelnohy3jgc6ivtqq5lhr3scodpk4vtfgsqsb66ji)
![44. A second remedy lies against the directors in a civil action for breach of duty of care. As noted, s. 122(1)(b) of the CBCA requires directors and officers of a corporation to “exercise the care, diligence and skill that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in comparable circumstances”. This duty, unlike the s. 122(1)(a) fiduciary duty, is not owed solely to the corporation, and thus may be the basis for liability to other stakeholders in accordance with principles governing the law of tort and extracontractual liability: Peoples Department Stores. Section 122(1)(b) does not provide an independent foundation for claims. However, applying the principles of The Queen in right of Canada v. Saskatchewan Wheat Pool, [1983] 1 S.C.R. 205, courts may take this statutory provision into account as to the standard of behaviour that should reasonably be expected.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5pjg2eunftajrebw6bxtq44g/bafkreifija4vkhcrekxgnohgfzqaxrt7ms64wiig473cb547pvocergzja)
![Dear Dr. Sweet,
I hereby submit my S 2026 syllabus for PHIL 111, Contemporary Moral Issues, for mandatory censorship review.
The syllabus has not changed much since I last taught the course. I have made some minor adjustments to the module on Race and Gender Ideology and to the lecture on Sexual Morality. These topics are commonly covered in this type of course nationwide, and the material is discussed in depth in the assigned textbook (Fiala and MacKinnon, 10th edition). I also ask my students to read a few passages from Plato (Aristophanes' myth of the split humans and Diotima's Ladder of Love).
Please note that my course does not "advocate" any ideology; I teach students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussions of contemporary moral issues.
If you interpret System Rule 08.01 §2.1(b) as prohibiting these topics, I would like to remind you that the U.S. Constitution protects my course content. Texas A&M is a public institution bound by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has noted that academic freedom is "a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom" (Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589, 603 [1967]).
Another relevant precedent is Sweezy v. New Hampshire. Here is Chief Justice Earl Warren for the majority in 1957:
"The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any straitjacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and stu](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5pjg2eunftajrebw6bxtq44g/bafkreias47524bi4ukbmlqalsyb47xjavdti7dk2khrtcpgrfedietsnee)
![Tough baby [in English in original] – A certain gesture of manliness, be it one’s own, be it that of another, deserves mistrust. It expresses independence, surety of the power of command, the silent conspiracy of all men with each other. Earlier one anxiously called it, awe-struck, the whims of lords, today it is democratized and is played by film heroes for the benefit of the lowliest bank employee. The archetype for this is the good looking man in a smoking jacket, who enters his bachelor’s pad alone one late evening, turns on the indirect lighting, and pours a whisky-soda: the carefully recorded fizzing of the mineral water says what the arrogant mouth does not; that he despises whatever does not smell of smoke, leather and shaving cream – above all, women, and for that very reason they swarm all over him. For him, the pinnacle of human relations is the club, the site of a respect founded on a considerate inconsiderateness. The joys of such men, or on the contrary of their models, which hardly anyone alive really matches, for human beings are always better than their culture, have altogether something of the latent act of violence. By all appearances, this is threatened to others, though he has long since had no need to do so, sprawled on his easy chair. In truth it is past violence against himself. If all pleasure sublates earlier displeasure [Unlust], then here displeasure is raised – as pride in bearing it – unmediated, untransformed](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5pjg2eunftajrebw6bxtq44g/bafkreiesvpqwvnmt2cku4haxvdif3nndee3ndqyzs6hicqvgg2dsujfwdu)
![here displeasure is raised – as pride in bearing it – unmediated, untransformed, stereotypically into pleasure: unlike wine, every glass of whiskey, every puff on the cigar still recalls the reluctance, which it must have cost the organism, to accustom itself to such powerful stimuli. According to their own constitution, the he-men would thus be what they are usually presented as in film scripts, masochists. The lie is concealed in their sadism, and it is as liars that they truly become sadists, agents of repression. That lie is nothing other than repressed homosexuality, which emerges as the only approved form of what is heterosexual. In Oxford one can differentiate between two kinds of students: the “tough guys” [in English in original] and the intellectuals; the latter are equated almost without further ado to those who are effeminate. There is a great deal of evidence that the ruling class polarizes itself according to these extremes on the road to dictatorship. Such disintegration is the secret of integration, of happiness of unity in the absence of happiness. In the end the “tough guys” [in English in original] are the ones who are really effeminate, who require the weaklings as their victims, in order not to admit that they are like them. Totality and homosexuality belong together. While the subject falls apart, it negates everything which is not of its own kind. The opposites of the strong man and the compliant youth fuse into a social order,](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5pjg2eunftajrebw6bxtq44g/bafkreibjr3eevn5unagewgz2r3zusczyvm4vekmdrg3kxvjvvxw5ns5p7a)
