“Compare a law professor’s presentation and a philosopher’s, and you’ll usually notice a striking difference. The law professor speaks without notes, or from a sketchy outline; the philosopher reads a paper. I think the difference results from something distinctive about the philosopher’s professional orientation. Precision–getting a point exactly right–matters more to philosophers than law professors, who tend to think, I believe, that getting in the ballpark of an interesting idea is more important than getting the idea exactly right. And, while you might get it exactly right in a written paper, a less formal presentation is likely to lack the desired degree of precision. So, you read your paper, guaranteeing that the precision of your oral presentation matches that of the written one.”

–from an article by Mark Tushnet (Georgetown Law, President of the Association of American Law Schools) on “Law and Allied Disciplines” in the AALS Newsletter of November 2003.