The Work Behind the Scholarship: Reflections on Interdisciplinary Collaboration
On August 21, The Georgetown Law Journal invited Professor Evelyn Rangel-Medina and me to speak with its incoming editorial staff about the process of developing legal scholarship. Our Article, Blood, Soil, and Race: The Perils of Shredding the Fourteenth Amendment, was published in The Georgetown Law Journal Online only days after the panel. Following more than a year of researching, writing, and revising together, the conversation gave me a chance to reflect on how the Article had evolved—and on how my own approach to legal scholarship had changed with it. Before law school, I earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at Temple, where my research focused on tourism, visual culture, and environmental change in the Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia. Anthropology trained me to pay attention to the categories institutions create, the assumptions behind them, and their consequences for the people subject to them. When I came to law school, I began encountering many of the same questions in a different register: through doctrine, legal institutions, and the categories law itself constructs. In Professor Rangel-Medina’s Latinxs and the Law seminar, those interests led …
