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Symposium—The Employment and Labor Law Professor as Public Intellectual:
Sharing Our Work with the World

Over the course of my career, I have received a lot of good advice that I want to share with my colleagues in the labor and employment law academy.  Specifically, I want to share my thoughts about how to disseminate our research outside the legal academy by testifying before Congress, state legislatures, and government agencies; writing op-eds and magazine articles; and speaking to the general public.

At the outset, I want to offer some general advice.  Some is based on things that I was told early in my academic career, and some I have learned on my own.

Perhaps the best advice that I ever received was to “make your research count at least three times.”  For me, this has often meant using my research in various capacities:  for law review and bar journal articles, for the classroom, for chapters in practitioner-type treatises, for continuing legal education programs, in testimony and submissions to government agencies, for op-eds, and for speeches to community groups like local chapters of the AARP and Kiwanis clubs. . . .