Legal Owls, Legal Eagles, and Howard Eisenberg: Art History Mystery, Part 3?
This week, I wanted to respond to Jane Casper’s comment on Peter Heyne’s post Art History Mystery, Part 2. Jane asks, “As long as you are looking into Law School art mysteries, perhaps someone can find out why the owl and bat figures are carved into the front of the arch over the Wisconsin Avenue entrance to Sensenbrenner Hall.” While I don’t know the exact reason for the bat and owl (leaving that to the true art historians!), her comment and the Dean’s recent post on the anniversary of Dean Eisenberg’s death, which was June 4, led me to the following reflective musings.
Howard Eisenberg was a legal “eagle” surely. I believe he was so because he perhaps was also a legal owl. All Harry Potter jokes aside, I find that owls and careful attorneys have a lot in common, not the least of which is that a plural grouping of owls is referred to as a “parliament.”
One tricky situation faced by many academics is how to respond to criticism of their work that the scholar does not believe is accurate or justified. A lot of scholars, in my opinion, don’t do this very effectively. The less effective responses are those in which the author is clearly indignant or angry. A reader who is not intimately familiar with the details is, I think, moved to conclude that the amount of emotion correlates to the degree to which the criticism has met its mark. I’ve always thought that the more persuasive response is one of faint bemusement—faint, because if the tone is openly mocking, that risks the perception among readers that the target did not take the criticism seriously enough.