About Excited Utterance
Excited Utterance is a podcast focusing on scholarship on evidence law and proof. The podcast aims to provide a weekly virtual workshop in the world of evidence throughout the academic year. More broadly, the podcast has four goals:
Distribute evidence scholarship to a broader audience.
Most evidence scholarship is published in academic law reviews and presented at academic conferences. Consequently, it often takes years for cutting-edge research to reach the broader legal community. By presenting new works of scholarship in a convenient, accessible, podcast format, Excited Utterance hopes to speed up delivery time and broaden the audience for evidence scholarship.
Provide a biweekly forum on evidence scholarship.
Law faculty workshops are typically attended by faculty from many different subfields, so rarely are there more than one or two evidence workshops at a school each year. Specialized evidence symposia have traditionally helped to fill this gap, but they have become more infrequent with tightening budgets. Podcasting potentially provides an economical solution to this problem.
Demonstrate a new, more efficient medium for academic discourse.
Excited Utterance hopes to demonstrate a new, more efficient mechanism for promoting academic discourse. Faculty workshops and conferences consume a great deal of time and resources. Speakers spend a minimum of one or two days of travel time to receive at most an hour or two of engagement with their work. At the same time, institutions incur considerable travel and accommodation costs either to host external speakers, or to send faculty to external conferences. By taking advantage of digital distribution, podcasting conserves time, money, and the hassle of travel.
Serve a democratizing function in the legal academy.
Traditionally, the limited speaking opportunities at conferences and workshops make it difficult for less established scholars to share their work. With a larger number of guest slots, the podcast hopes to give a wider array of scholars the chance to distribute their research to interested colleagues and the public at large.