Yesterday the interwebs sent me a link to the an interesting essay by David Hoffman, a contracts scholar at Penn who wrote an article in the aughts provocatively titled The Best Puffery Article Ever. When discussing puffing in my Negotiation class, I use the title to provide a fun example of puffing. Nevertheless, the paper is more of a First Amendment / economics paper than a negotiation paper, which never fancied my interests, and I’ve relegated it to become a footnote in my mind.
In the substack essay Not My Best (Puffery) Article Hoffman revisits his article and says something surprising – he thinks it’s not good. Specifically,
Every so often someone trots out my now twenty-year-old The Best Puffery Article Ever on a list of best-titled law review pieces of all time. That 2006 titular joke paid dividends—attention, downloads, invitations, and the gift of giving dozens of workshop hosts an easy line with which to introduce me. Titles make a difference.
It’s been twenty years, and . . . it’s time to admit that the article isn’t terribly good. It might be the worst paper I’ve written. It certainly was the piece of scholarship that my tenure reviewers had to write around. I regret nothing, and certainly not the title. But I’m glad enough to believe that the ratio of starts to completes is as low on SSRN as it is on Netflix.
The rest of the piece explains the various problems he now sees in the article, which is quite impressive. How many academics can reflect on a paper in this way, and then put it out there for the whole world? Do too many of us have a glass jaw to do this? Could our egos handle it?
While I sometime find myself feeling ambivalent about some of my articles, I have no regrets. Looking at my CV, I don’t see myself going back and critiquing any of them publicly like Hoffman has. Who has the time to do that? Heck, I’m conflicted enough about writing this post because I should be doing something “more productive.” Plus, I’d rather appreciate the growth my work represents and focus on advancing the field as best I can.
That said, major props to Hoffman. His gesture underscores the importance of intellectual humility, which should be celebrated, and models one of the many ways it can be expressed.
Our own Len Riskin provided a great model of the humility that you celebrate, Art. He coined the terms “facilitative” and “evaluative” mediation in 1994, and he elaborated his analysis in his 1996 article, Understanding Mediators’ Orientations, Strategies, and Techniques: A Grid for the Perplexed.
In 2003, he published Decision-Making in Mediation: The New Old Grid and the New New Grid System, in which he devoted 20 pages (!) to describing problems with the so-called Riskin Grid.
Alas, few people have heeded his insightful self-critique.
Thanks for highlighting this Art. I remember coming across Patrick Casement’s classic “Learning From Our Mistakes: Beyond Dogma in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.” It seemed less ‘boasty’ than the negotiation and mediation books of the period with their tales of high value success. Hats off to David Hoffman for being self-critical.