At the colloquium, as I was going back and forth with Professor Volokh about bloggers' privilege, something that Professor Barnett had said earlier during his presentation suddenly made a lot of sense to me. He had talked about, given his recent experience arguing the Raich case, how being an advocate involved a different sort of thinking than did being an academic. As I was (inadvertently) debating Professor Volokh the truth of the observation became apparent, because while Volokh was responding as a scholar I was flashing back to my moot court experience and doing everything I could mentally to advocate for there being a privilege for bloggers. While you might think you'd end up in the same place with both approaches, in reality you don't necessarily. As a scholar you can idealize the legal landscape and theorize how to better shape its contours. As an advocate, however, you must navigate the existing landscape to get to a specific result. If there's a conceptual mountain in the way, you have to find some way to get around it. Whereas as a scholar you are often the one creating (or at least mapping) the landscape and deciding where those mountains are or should be.
Still, it's not as though one approach is necessarily better than the other. As Professor Barnett pointed out to me later, there's value in having practiced both kinds of thinking and letting the experience of each inform the other to make you better at both.
Written 5/2. Edited and posted 7/9.