others. Finally, they highlighted the tendency to learn from those who have actually faced legal actions
on a given issue along with the importance of commonality and its link to reputation and learning from
elites. Beginning with a brief summary of the research methodology, the following pages document the
three categories of findings highlighted above relying heavily on quotes and paraphrases from the
interviews. While not a perfect test of the whole model, they do provide significant support for it and
its findings.
Methodology:
The data in this paper is derived from conversational interviews with lawyers in the general
counsel’s office, or similar personnel, at 20 colleges and universities.
While the theory is meant to be
general, I chose universities as opposed to other industries because I suspected that university
personnel would be more willing to support my work by participating
and because the legal issues that
universities confront are substantively interesting and accessible.
University attorneys also have
exposure to a broad range of issues, so they individually have experience dealing with changes in
variety of different areas of law. Finally, higher education is an industry with tremendous diversity
among institutions, discernible hierarchies and well-defined clusters of peer institution. This makes it
easier to observe and understand if and how organizations rely on each other.
The legal edifice at different colleges and universities is organized differently so I attempted to
interview a person with a generalist’s purview at each institution. This meant speaking with the general
counsel (GC) at many schools, but I also spoke with assistant or deputy GCs, compliance officers, and
5
Princeton University’s counsel’s office provided initial support and advice about structuring these interviews along
offering ideas about what issues to raise and which to avoid.
6
Lawyers are certainly a difficult group to get information from in general, but the attorneys I spoke with were almost
universally forthcoming and willing to discuss the issues (with some lawyerly caution mixed in)
7
While I have no other industries to compare to, my experience suggests these were probably correct assumptions as the
people I contacted were very willing to share their time and information and the issues we discussed were reasonably
familiar to me as a student immersed in university life.
11
Convention