User:HCL&Policy

I am working on a draft submission and am seeking preliminary reactions concerning its acceptability for Wikipedia. I recently wrote to the Teahouse and got some helpful reactions but that thread got lost somehow. (This is my first encounter with the technologically arcane Wikipedia World.) So I'm trying again by tentatively creating a User page. I now have a confirmed email address with Wikipedia that may could help me establish a connection with anyone interested in helping me at this early stage. Anyone interested in advising me can, presumably, use that address--hav@law.duke.edu--to request a look at the current draft as a pdf file.

The central question at this point is whether the piece may be deemed too autobiographical. Although the piece is written in the third-person and strives for objectivity, the subject is my personal engagement as a scholar in the field of health policy from 1970 to nearly the present time. The justification for the piece is that my scholarly career was fortuitously dedicated almost exclusively to pioneering, with a unique perspective and well ahead of others, legal scholarship in an obviously important, fast-changing and controversial field that had been seriously neglected by legal scholars. My work was broadly focused and distinctive enough that my critical perspective on how and why health policy evolved as it did in those forty years is pretty certain to be of value to future students and scholars in a variety of disciplines. How I got started in the field with both a unique perspective and a significant head start over others is quite interesting in itself, but that story is not told in the piece because I have eschewed biographical details. The fuller story, possibly helpful is understanding the larger picture, can be found in an earlier, explicitly autobiographical article that is cited (with a link) in the draft's first footnote.

Thus, my Wikipedia entry is meant to be read as a history of American health policy, especially its dominant legal and economic aspects, informed by the writings and published insights of a contemporary, uniquely qualified scholar. Although an editor may find places where neutrality could be improved, I have striven to achieve the objectivity desired. I understand that the piece, if published, would be subject to amendments by others. I suppose there are some out there who might want the final word, but I do not think there is much to contradict. HCL&Policy