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A USEFUL WAY TO THINK about research in a professional school setting is to consider the role of learned professions in contemporary society. Traditionally, professions were invested with responsibilities to the community as well as to their paying clientele. Modern professions share this sense of social trusteeship with their forebears, while serving to a greater degree as repositories of expert knowledge in our increasingly specialized world. Optimal research in the professions adds to this knowledge base but does so in a social context and for public rather than private benefit.The ubiquitous professor's dilemma of instruction vs. scholarship can become a trilemma in the professions, where service -- treating patients or undertaking pro bono legal representation -- is often added to research and teaching. In many ways, these competing demands on the time and energies of academic professionals mirror similar pressures facing those in practice.
I feel fortunate to work in an area -- health care law and policy -- that is potentially useful to law students, valuable to society, and conducive to rigorous study. My research focuses on regulation of managed care and its relation to individual rights and social goals. For example, I am examining the role of information in health care and the potential applicability of established regimes of information-based regulation, such as the federal securities laws, to a managed care system. An important practical advantage of teaching at a top-ranked law school like Columbia is that financial support, including student research assistance, is available to help young faculty pursue their research interests. As a result, pressure to publish is focused on the scholarship itself, not on grant writing or other ancillary administrative tasks that often preoccupy researchers in academic settings.
Working with truly exceptional law students, I have come to regard teaching as a form of peer review for my ideas. Students also help me keep in touch with real-world concerns and trends, especially because most spend their summers working in law firms or public interest organizations. Teaching is also a reminder of the crucial -- though sometimes neglected -- social responsibilities of professionals. For example, the desire to instill ethical values and provide role models for students -- as well as to impart basic skills -- tempers the otherwise natural tendencies of many medical researchers to gravitate toward pure science and many legal scholars toward moral philosophy.
Finally, working in a law or medical school setting creates valuable opportunities for self-study. Each fall, I teach a seminar on professionalism with half law-student and half medical-student enrollment. As it turns out, the students usually teach me, changing my views on professional culture and its social consequences. As Pogo might have said, "We have met the research project, and it is us."
WILLIAM M. SAGE, J.D., M.D., is associate professor of law at Columbia Law School.
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