Bauen

Friday, October 21, 2005

Koh and the Supreme Court

Wouldn't it be nice if Harold Koh were on the Supreme Court? That would probably be the case if it were not for the War on Gore. Sigh.

Another thing he said was, "Theory without practice is as lifeless as practice without theory is thoughtless." Partly because of that, I became convinced that I had to somehow make my academic work relevant to what was happening in the real world.

When I got to the State Department, I was struck -- I said this in a number of things -- that people with ideas have no influence, and people with influence have no ideas. The people who are making decisions often have no time to consult anything academic. But [even] if they do, it's not written clearly enough for them to be able to apply it. The people with ideas who do have time to think about these things often don't present their ideas in a way that they can be used by those who are trying to make decisions. So I've tried to bridge that gap as much as I can.

You're suggesting that the potential for synergy is very great, but that mediation is required between these two worlds. Is that a fair assessment?

Oh, very much so. When I was in the government, every day matters would arise in which I'd think, "How can I be making this decision in such a short-term focus? Somebody must have written about this. Somebody must have put this into a pattern, and I'd like to know what that pattern is." I would send my staff out to look for articles and books. But very often what they came back with was so tangential and so abstract that I couldn't use it; it didn't help me. When I went back into academia in 2001, part of my thought was that I needed to figure out a way to bridge this divide.

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