Anshuman Sahoo, Director, Law Matters Centre for Research, Education, and Social Action (https://lamcresa.in/).
Academic research and policy research are routinely treated as points on a single spectrum, distinguished primarily by the depth of their inquiry or the technicality of their language. The assumption is that policy research is simply applied academic research, that the think tank analyst does what the professor does, only faster and for a more impatient audience. This assumption is worth questioning. The two enterprises are not merely different in degree. They are different in kind, organized around different orientations, serving different audiences, and maintaining fundamentally different relationships to abstraction. Mapping this difference precisely is a prerequisite for understanding what kind of legal knowledge production is currently possible, and what kinds remain conspicuously absent.
The policy think tank operates under a defining orientation: it starts with a problem that people are facing and ends with a solution that will benefit them. This people-centric posture is not merely a normative commitment, though it is often described in those terms. It is a structural feature of the institution, shaped by the demands of its primary audiences and the logic of its funding. The typical consumer of think tank output is a bureaucrat, a legislator, or a senior official who possesses neither the time nor the professional incentive to engage with theoretical complexity. Policy recommendations must be legible, actionable, and defensible within the cognitive and institutional constraints of those who will act on them.
It is a structural feature of the institution, shaped by the demands of its primary audiences and the logic of its funding.
Abstraction, in this context, is heavily discouraged. A policy brief that introduces philosophical uncertainty where the reader expects a clear intervention is understood to have missed its purpose. The discipline imposed by the policy format, the executive summary, the numbered recommendation, the theory of change, is a discipline against equivocation. Whatever philosophical or theoretical scaffolding may have informed the analyst’s thinking, it must be dissolved before the final product reaches the audience. The ideas survive, but their genealogy is rendered invisible.
To clarify, this is not a criticism of the think tank model. It reflects an accurate understanding of how policy change actually happens. Recommendations that cannot be translated into bureaucratic action are recommendations that will not be acted upon. The constraint is real, and working within it is a form of intellectual honesty about the conditions under which influence is possible.
Academic research operates under a different institutional logic. It is not, as a matter of formal obligation, required to concern itself with people at all. This is not a failing of academia so much as a reflection of its constitutive purpose: the advancement of knowledge, wherever that pursuit leads. A doctoral researcher in jurisprudence may spend years elaborating a theory of legal personhood that has no immediate application to any concrete human situation. That work may nonetheless be valuable, may even eventually transform legal practice, but the absence of a direct human beneficiary does not disqualify it as a scholarly contribution.
The doctoral degree, the PhD, is not incidental here. It is the institutional training ground for a particular relationship with abstraction. To complete a doctorate is, in significant part, to demonstrate the capacity to sustain rigorous inquiry at a level of generality that exceeds the immediate and the concrete. The discipline of philosophy, from which the degree takes its name, carries a certain orientation: a willingness to follow an argument wherever it leads, to remain with uncertainty rather than resolve it prematurely, to treat the most fundamental questions as genuinely open. This orientation is rewarded in academic culture and reproduced through its training structures.
To complete a doctorate is, in significant part, to demonstrate the capacity to sustain rigorous inquiry at a level of generality that exceeds the immediate and the concrete.
The result is that academic research is, in a meaningful sense, institutionally comfortable with being useless in the short term. It can afford to be. Its legitimacy derives from a different source, peer recognition, theoretical contribution, disciplinary advancement, rather than from the capacity to move a policy agenda forward by the end of a fiscal year.
Given these two models, a question arises about a particular kind of intellectual project that neither accommodates well. Consider the enterprise of theorizing the lived legal experience of marginalized communities: taking the struggles of people at the margins of law’s protection, attending carefully to how those struggles reveal something about the structure and operation of legal systems, and using that attention to build a more responsive and grounded jurisprudence. This is an intellectually serious project with a distinguished lineage. Scholars like Upendra Baxi have long argued that legal theory cannot remain credible if it is developed exclusively from the vantage point of those for whom law functions as designed. A jurisprudence built from the experience of law’s failures, from the perspective of those whom law most often fails, offers something that mainstream legal theory structurally cannot.
Yet this project sits awkwardly in both institutional homes. For the academic, it is perhaps too people-bound, too committed to a particular population’s experience to aspire to the universality that theoretical credibility is thought to require. The methodology of grounding theory in particular local struggles may appear, within certain academic frameworks, as a limitation rather than a strength. For the policy think tank, the project is too theoretically ambitious and insufficiently action-oriented. The goal of building a global jurisprudence from local experiences is not easily translated into a numbered list of recommendations. The abstraction is not, in this case, a liability that can simply be removed. It is constitutive of the project’s purpose.
The result is a kind of institutional homelessness. The project is neither abstract enough for pure academia nor concrete enough for standard policy work. It falls into a gap that the existing institutional architecture of legal knowledge production was not designed to fill.
It might be tempting to treat this as a problem for the particular institutions that find themselves caught between the two models. It is, however, a more general problem for the quality and responsiveness of legal knowledge. If legal theory is developed primarily by those operating at a distance from the populations most affected by law’s operation, it risks becoming self-referential: a conversation conducted among those for whom law broadly works, about the nature of law. The resulting theory may be internally coherent and technically sophisticated while remaining systematically blind to dimensions of legal experience that would complicate or destabilize its conclusions.
The policy world, meanwhile, generates practical interventions without the theoretical depth required to understand why those interventions succeed or fail, or whether they are addressing symptoms rather than structures. A policy that treats a particular community’s lack of access to justice as a resource problem, without engaging with the deeper structural and semiotic reasons why legal institutions have historically failed that community, is likely to reproduce the failure in a different register.
The gap between the two models is not, therefore, simply an institutional inconvenience but rather an epistemic gap with real consequences for whether legal knowledge, as a body of thought and practice, can do what it claims to do: organize social life in ways that are fair, responsive, and accountable to those it governs.
An institution that seeks to occupy this gap faces a specific and demanding challenge: it must develop two distinct communicative registers without allowing either to compromise the other. The first register is philosophical, the language of theory, abstraction, and structural analysis. This register is necessary for the intellectual project itself, for the work of building a jurisprudence that is genuinely responsive to experience at the margin rather than merely sympathetic to it. Without this register, the institution cannot do the theoretical work that distinguishes it from a service delivery organization.
The second register is what might be called the impact narrative: a concrete, accessible account of what the institution does, who it works with, and what changes its work produces or aims to produce. This register is necessary for communicating with funders, policymakers, and broader publics who will not engage with the philosophical register and should not be expected to. The impact narrative does not betray the theoretical project. It translates it into a language that a different audience can receive.
The challenge is that these two registers, if not carefully managed, can pull against each other. An institution that allows its impact narrative to drive its intellectual agenda will find itself doing policy work dressed in theoretical language. An institution that allows its philosophical register to dominate its external communication will find itself unable to sustain the institutional relationships necessary for its work to have any purchase on the world it is analyzing. The solution is not to choose between them but to recognize that they serve different functions and to develop the discipline to deploy each appropriately.
There is a certain irony in this argument that is worth acknowledging. The diagnosis of the abstraction-concreteness divide is itself conducted in abstract language. The very equipment required to identify the problem is the same equipment that creates the communicative difficulty. This is not a paradox that can be resolved; it is a structural feature of the position. Those most equipped to theorize the gap between academic and policy knowledge are, almost by definition, people trained in academic abstraction. The diagnosis arrives in the form of the disease. What this means practically is that the work of translation, of rendering philosophical architecture into impact narrative, is not a secondary or merely communicative task. It is a constitutive part of the intellectual project itself.
Institutions that refuse to settle into either the academic or the policy model pay a real price. They are too abstract for some funders and not abstract enough for some academic audiences. They produce outputs that do not fit neatly into established citation categories or policy document formats. They require their participants to maintain a kind of double fluency that is professionally unusual and personally demanding. The communicative friction is not incidental. It is a predictable consequence of occupying institutional space that the existing architecture was not designed to accommodate.
The alternative, however, is a more serious cost. Retreating into pure theory means abandoning the claim that legal knowledge should be answerable to the experience of those it governs. Retreating into pure policy work means accepting that the structural conditions that produce legal exclusion are either too slow-moving or too theoretical to be worth engaging with directly. Both retreats leave something important undone.
There is a case, then, not merely for tolerating institutions that occupy this difficult intermediate space, but for actively valuing them. A legal knowledge ecosystem that contains only universities and think tanks, however excellent each may be within its own logic, is an ecosystem with a structural blind spot. The gap it leaves is not filled by either model working harder or communicating better. It requires a different kind of institution, one that has built the capacity to think philosophically and act concretely, and has the discipline to know when each register is called for.
Note: We, at LaMCRESA, are trying to fill in this epistemic gap. Read our manifesto here.
