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Introduction

Some Thoughts on Biography

A bit of personal background is necessary to fully understand the moti-vation behind this project. I attended Yale Law School between 1986 and 1989. It was truly an exciting time to be at Yale, which had more of the feel of a think tank than a law school. There were ideas flying around from every direction, but the big idea that captivated my imagination was law and economics. This was a predictable outcome given my undergraduate training in economics. But law and economics was only one of an array of theoretical positions being bandied about, which included law and litera-ture, feminist theory, liberal political theory, and philosophy of law. After a brief stint as a corporate lawyer, I eventually made my way into academia as a law professor at my current institution, Northeastern University. It was not until I arrived in Boston that I was introduced to critical legal stud-ies through my colleague Karl Klare, and Duncan Kennedy and Morton Horwitz at Harvard Law School. It was principally through my exposure to Duncan and “Mort” that I became interested in intellectual history. My

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first major foray into intellectual history came in the form of Under Cover of Science: American Legal-Economic Theory and the Quest for Objectiv-ity. I wrote that book very much under the influence of Michel Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge. The focus was on the structural relationship between disciplines. Methodologically, I expressly underplayed the notion of influence, the extent to which individual authors exercised agency, and how their personal background fed into their work. I considered myself a structuralist. While I still do believe that there is much to be gleaned from a structuralist perspective on intellectual history, I found myself to be increasingly interested in the ways that the lives and social contexts of indi-viduals shaped the movements in which they found themselves—a decid-edly anti-structuralist inquiry. It was that impulse that acted as the catalyst for this project.

This collection of interviews is an attempt to provide a firsthand account of the movements, personalities, and ideas that so animated my time at Yale Law School and the legal academy in general during the 1980s through the lens of some of the era’s major figures. Aside from my personal inter-est, why the 1980s? This decade was an extraordinary period in American legal theory. There were movements formed and intellectual battles waged. There were not only paradigm shifts, but also paradigm proliferation and disintegration—real battles. Importantly, this is the period that set the stage for the current, and to my mind future, terrain of the legal academy. It marked the shift in the legal academy from a largely doctrinally focused enterprise, to an arena in which high-level theoretical and interdisciplin-ary work thrives. The theoretical tracks we navigate today and will traverse into the future were laid down during this critical period in the 1980s. Also, as illustrated in these interviews, the developments in the 1980s were in many ways an extension of the sometimes-tumultuous social forces and legal developments that marked the 1960s. This is reflected in the profound demographic shift within the legal academy during the 1980s. During this period, for the first time in the legal academy, there was a critical mass of non-white-male voices. Issues of difference in the composition of the legal academy and the impact that law had on socially marginalized communi-ties first began to surface in a serious way during this period. There was an incredibly high degree of intellectual, social, and cultural vibrancy in the legal academy and profession. This is why it is so vital that we understand this era.

The academics interviewed in this book represent several of the move-ments or schools of thought that ascended in the legal academy through

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the 1980s: law and economics, feminist legal theory, law and society, con-temporary liberal constitutional theory, conservative/libertarian constitu-tional theory, critical legal studies, critical race theory, law and literature, law and philosophy, critical legal history, and postmodern theory. This is an admittedly partial list, but it does reflect a broad and representative range of contemporary legal theory. In laying out the plans for this project, I purposefully limited myself to one interview per movement (although some participants straddle multiple subject areas), and there were diffi-cult choices to be made regarding who should be interviewed. Of course, no one individual can fully represent a movement, and I am not making the claim that any one of the interviewees is the representative. The final list of interviewees resulted from a combination of choice and fortuitous-ness. In the end, I was privileged to talk with an extraordinary collection of legal academics: Bruce Ackerman, Jules Coleman, Drucilla Cornell, Charles Fried, Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, Catharine MacKinnon, Richard Posner, Austin Sarat, and Patricia Williams. All of them entered the academy between the 1960s and 1980s. My interest in this group is no doubt, as Duncan Kennedy makes the point in our interview, the product of my being part of a transitional generation—old enough to have been a student at the tail end of some of the clamorous debates, but too young to have been involved in the initial formations or amid the more raucous disputes.

Why interview? The format is motivated by my earlier expressed interest in getting to know the lives and inspiration of the people engaged in these movements. The most prevalent application of the “interview” is, of course, in journalism. It may strike one as a strange undertaking in the academic setting, but there is a rich history of the interview as a mode of discourse in philosophy.1 I first became fascinated by this format while viewing a grainy black-and-white movie featuring an interview with Jean-Paul Sartre and other French intellectuals associated with him (most prominently Simone de Beauvoir).2 I had not been trained as a philosopher, and I knew very little about Sartre. But the interview captivated me because I really began to get a feel for Sartre and his intellectual/social “moment” over the course of the viewing. There is a presentness, spontaneity, and humanity in an interview that cannot be duplicated in exposition—which is one reason I insisted that the interviews be conducted face-to-face. (For accuracy purposes, I did have the interviewees assist in editing the transcripts.) It is a genre that poses unexpected surprises for both the interviewer and the interviewee, and, ide-ally, those who read the interviews.

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There were many surprises during the course of these interviews. They ranged from the sublime, such as Jules Coleman’s theory that “most of the people [he] knew who got into analytic philosophy began with existential-ism,” to the peculiarly personal, such as Drucilla Cornell’s discussion of how as a young woman she “saw that Kant wasn’t enough when it came to dating,” so she turned to Hegel. And you can imagine my shock in finding out that Duncan Kennedy, a prominent critical legal studies founder and outspoken leftist, worked for the CIA in his youth. These interviews also gave me a bet-ter sense of historical events that I had read about but never experienced firsthand. For example, it is common knowledge that there was a lot of crit-icism of critical legal studies from various segments of the legal academy. But it was not until I made my way through these interviews that it became clear how the attraction, aversion, critique, defense, and reaction to critical legal studies was such a big part of the dynamic during the 1970s through the 1990s. Those who one might expect to be critical of critical legal studies—Jules Coleman, Richard Posner, and Bruce Ackerman—are in fact critical in ways that reveal deep animus that quickly surfaces during the interviews. But even “allies” of the critical legal studies movement—Drucilla Cornell, Aus-tin Sarat, and Patricia Williams—reveal a complicated relationship. There is a similar complicated dynamic concerning law and economics, with even those who are sympathetic toward it—Bruce Ackerman, Jules Coleman, and Charles Fried—offering up a critique or qualifying their relationship with it. Of course, the critics of law and economics also reflect great disdain toward it. The soup is thickened once the play of interpersonal dynamics is added to the mix.

Yes, there is personal drama in the academy. Patricia Williams provides us with a revealing account of the way she and a handful of other faculty of color were uncomfortably put in the position of having to “represent” the views of people of color at a critical legal studies conference. Jules Cole-man makes it clear that there is no way to understand the philosophical interchange between Ronald Dworkin and him without coming to grips with the complicated and at times nasty personal relationship between the two. Duncan Kennedy characterizes the critiques from Richard Posner and Ronald Dworkin as personal. Drucilla Cornell is blunt and personal in her criticism of Catharine MacKinnon’s stance regarding women sex workers. In a twist of expectations, MacKinnon displays warmth toward Richard Posner and respect for the policy focus of law and economics. Particu-larly poignant is Morton Horwitz’s personal disappointment and recollec-tion of a walk through Harvard Yard with Robert McCloskey, the highly

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regarded Harvard constitutional law historian and Horwitz’s teacher, dur-ing which McCloskey suggested, presumptively due to his fidelity to legal process norms as opposed to racial animus, that it would have been better if the U.S. Supreme Court had not overruled Plessy v. Ferguson (the case that approved race-based separate but equal laws, which was overruled in Brown v. Board of Education). These personal accounts not only are inter-esting peeks into the lives of prominent figures but also have an impact on their (and by extension the academy’s) intellectual development. One theme that seemed to repeat itself, which fits with the general existential position of the academic, is the “outsider” status of many of those inter-viewed. Charles Fried’s family, although economically privileged, had to flee Europe as Jewish émigrés. Morton Horwitz’s father was a taxi driver and Horwitz discusses attending City College of New York (now City Uni-versity of New York), which, while no longer the “poor kid’s Harvard” due to Jewish students attending the school in the face of Ivy League anti-Semitism, catered to an underprivileged student body. Other interview-ees cite their relatively modest economic background as part of the nar-rative relevant to their intellectual identity. Patricia Williams discusses the level of hyper-marginalization she endured as an African American woman attending Harvard Law School in the 1970s post-Bakke (the famous Unites States Supreme Court case that fueled debate on affirmative action). Being situated as an outsider and feeling the compulsion to “speak truth to power”—or, to frame it in less left-political terms, understand the “way the world works”—resonates with me as an African American who grew up in South Central Los Angeles.

“We Are All Legal Realists Now”

The now famous, or infamous, quote, “we are all legal realists now,” has been so ensconced in the lore of the legal academy that it is stated with-out attribution. I take the essential meaning behind the quote to be that all jurisprudential positions post–legal realism are in someway a response to the central penumbra ascribed to the legal realists: the law/politics dis-tinction. Legal realism has its roots in the late 19th and early 20th century. It was Oliver Wendell Holmes who in his landmark Common Law (1881) interrogated the natural law position that law was a preordained phenom-enon separated from historical and social context. This was the beachhead both for the legal realist assault on natural law to follow, and the realist insight that law is infused with political interventions. One way to frame

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the trajectory of legal theory post–legal realism is that it is a site of contes-tation concerning to what extent politics frames law. I am using the term “politics” in a very broad sense to incorporate not just the notion of eco-nomic interest-group politics, but also the politics of culture, identity, and other sites of contestation. The law/politics dichotomy is highlighted in my interview with Duncan Kennedy, and he uses it as a unifying theme in his narrative of how legal theory has evolved. The conflict over the law/poli-tics divide was reflected within legal realism. There were two prominent strands of legal realism. One emphasized examining the context of law. The emphasis was on empirical studies and sociological analysis regarding how legal rules affect society. Another, more controversial branch of legal realism emphasized the malleability of law. The negative implication of the malleability thesis is that not only do judges decide law, but they do so in ways that lack any fundamental principles—law as politics. This strand of legal realism came under heavy assault on several fronts, one of which being that in the aftermath of World War II critics took as legal realism’s logical consequence that there was no principled way of ruling out legal and government regimes—including those with a totalitarian or Commu-nist bent.

Limiting Politics through Legal Process

The legal process school, which developed in the 1950s, had as its central tenet the idea that the key to legitimating law (and limiting the incursion of politics) is proper process. This view of the world put a premium on various state actors, particularly judges, playing their proper role within the system. Legal process had as an underlying mission an effort to depoliticize law. This charge was particularly salient given the historical backdrop of World War II and the Cold War. Legal process arose against the background of anti-Communist sentiment and the specter of fascism. While there might not be a “right” substantive outcome for legal decisions, there was a correct, demo-cratic, process for reaching those decisions.

For anyone attending an American law school from the 1950s through the 1960s, legal process and the general tilt against leftist thought (given fervent anti-Communist sentiment) pervaded their experience. Morton Horwitz eloquently discusses the hold of legal process and the influence of anti-Communist politics in the post-1950s legal academy. To the extent that legal academics during this period were not legal process adherents, which principally affected public law subjects such as constitutional and

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administrative law, they were doctrinalists without much of a theoretical view at all. The legal process school’s “neutral principles” tenet and the doctrinalists’ tacit approval of the status quo repulsed 1960s social move-ment activists.

In conducting my interviews I was struck by the ways the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War affected the generation that rose to prom-inence in the 1980s legal academy. For leftist students, the failure (by and large) of their legal process elders to support the judicial architecture of the civil rights movement, and the Warren Court more broadly, was damning. This was only heightened by the perceived paralysis of law school faculty concerning opposition to the Vietnam War. Conservatives attending law school during this same period drew an opposing lesson. The cause for con-cern was the radicalism and chaos generated by movement leftists as they “paraded through the streets and occupied faculty offices” at a time when the echoes of totalitarian regimes still shaped conservatives’ views of politi-cal order. Richard Posner recalls that one reason for his moving away from a left-leaning political position as a young lawyer in the 1960s was that he “didn’t like all the rioting of the late sixties, you know, the Vietnam stuff. I call that disorder.”

The Law and Neoclassical Economics Moment

Law and economics, more precisely labeled law and neoclassical economics to make clear that it represents a particular strand of the economics tradi-tion, adopts the position that the touchstone for analyzing law is the effi-ciency criterion. In 1960, an unassuming economist at the University of Chi-cago wrote a relatively slender article that would mark the beginnings of an academic and political revolution. The economist’s name was Ronald Coase, and the article is titled “The Problem of Social Cost.” “Social Cost” was revo-lutionary because it called into question the progressive, pro-government-intervention consensus, epitomized in the macroeconomics sphere by the belief in Keynesian economics. In law, it was manifest in the idea, largely attributed to the legal realists, that judicial intervention was necessary to aid the disadvantaged. “Social Cost” is a technical article infused with a larger political ideal. The technical point of the piece, that in a world of non-pro-hibitive transactions costs, private ordering (the free market) can solve the problem of socially detrimental individual behavior, may well have ended up on the proverbial ash bin of history had it not been for an impending politi-cal revolution.

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In 1962 a “B actor” and General Electric pitchman by the name of Ron-ald Reagan switched his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican. It was the initial step in a long journey that would eventually lead him to the U.S. presidency and what has been referred to as the “Reagan revolu-tion.” Daniel Yergin has done a masterful job of chronicling the ideas and events that culminated in the demise of what has been labeled the “com-manding heights” (referring to social regimes in which the economies are managed from the commanding heights of government).3 The prevailing pro-government-intervention consensus fueled the ire of Friedrich Hayek in his 1944 tract The Road to Serfdom. Post–World War II there was a flood of commentary from conservative economists lauding the virtues of the free market in the spirit (and sometimes under the direct tutelage) of Hayek. A few decades later this would be personified in Milton Friedman’s wildly popular Free to Choose (1980). Friedman and others from the Uni-versity of Chicago exemplified the model of technically trained economist as free market proselytizer.

Both the free market ideology and neoclassical economics techniques would eventually make their way into the heart of law schools. In 1972 Richard Posner wrote a comprehensive text applying neoclassical econom-ics techniques to legal issues, Economic Analysis of Law. Posner was a Har-vard-trained lawyer who had some exposure to economic analysis while working as a government bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. But it was not until Posner encountered Aaron Director, an influential University of Chi-cago economist, while a law faculty member at Stanford that he began to be immersed in neoclassical economics. He very soon moved to the Uni-versity of Chicago Law School, which, in affiliation with the University of Chicago business and economics departments, was at the center of the movement to spread conservative ideas. While Posner was a free market adherent, there were also moderate/left-leaning practitioners of law and neoclassical economics. In 1970 Guido Calabresi, a descendent of Yale Law School legal realism, applied neoclassical economics to tort law in his path-breaking Costs of Accidents. Calabresi could best be described as a political progressive with pro-consumer impulses. Neoclassical economics had also been placed at the center of antitrust law with Robert Bork’s Antitrust Para-dox (1978). The touchstone of the legal economists, irrespective of political orientation or doctrinal field, was a belief that legal rules and policy could be examined and prescribed through the lens of economic analysis. The

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legal economists were clearly on the law-as-nonpolitical end of the law/politics spectrum exposed by the legal realists.

The Birth of Critical Studies and Diversity in the Legal Academy

As law and economics was making its way through the legal academy, establishing a foothold in virtually every area of law, at the same time, ironically (or predictably), the leftist critical legal studies movement was also forming. Three of its founding members (Morton Horwitz, Duncan Kennedy, and Roberto Unger) began teaching at the Harvard Law School in the early 1970s. Subsequently, through the mid-1970s, the critical legal studies movement was formed. The initial critical legal studies meeting featured a conglomeration of leftist legal academics that included David Trubek and others who would become prominent in the law and society movement. While critical legal studies enjoyed a period of organizational momentum (roughly 1977 to 1994), as measured by periodic conferences, the law and society movement became firmly entrenched institutionally through the efforts of leaders such as Austin Sarat and continues to have a significant presence in the academy. Law and society adherents were engaged in a form of scholarship that hewed more closely, but not exclu-sively, to the empirical strand of legal realism. They were largely social sci-entists interested in legal phenomena. Critical legal studies scholars were more explicitly leftist and political in their approach, and had an affin-ity for the cultural wing of legal realism. The “crits” were apt to highlight the political dimensions of law. The tension ultimately resulted in the two groups failing to coalesce.

An intriguing development in critical legal studies is the emphasis on historicism. Morton Horwitz is an exemplar of a critical approach to his-tory, but he is joined by such prominent legal historians as Robert Gor-don, Lawrence Friedman, and John Henry Schlegel. Their ascendancy in the legal academy illustrates the growing presence of left-leaning his-torians in the years following the 1960s. But the influx of historians into the academy also highlights a more general phenomenon—an increasing number of PhDs in the legal academy. The increase in PhDs was truly a supply-demand phenomenon. On the one hand, newly minted PhDs found it increasingly difficult to find positions in humanities and social science

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departments. On the other hand, law schools (particularly elite schools) were rapidly moving away from the law professor as doctrinalist model to the scholar as prototype.

Along with the increased focus on theory was an unprecedented demo-graphic diversification of law school faculty. Prior to the 1960s, women and people of color were in large part not allowed to join law school faculty. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, things began to change. This phenom-enon cannot be appreciated without taking into account its connection to larger social movements. In particular, the women’s and civil rights move-ments helped catalyze diversity in law school admissions and faculty hiring. This shift brought along with it intellectual diversity. Feminist legal theory made its way into law schools through the women’s movement and gender studies. Catharine MacKinnon played a major role in reorienting the lens through which the legal academy viewed issues affecting women. For exam-ple, MacKinnon argued that rape was part of a continuum of violence against women that was embedded in an inherently sexist culture. Concerning civil rights and race, Derrick Bell argued that law was not neutral, and could be understood only through the prism of race. His was a first foray into the field that would become known as critical race theory. Critical race theory also included among its founders such noted scholars as Richard Delgado, and has mushroomed into a multi-organizational phenomenon—including the highly influential LatCrit movement. Patricia Williams, a student of Bell’s, is often identified with critical race theory. While historically Williams is most definitely a key figure in critical race theory, her writing is decidedly eclec-tic. She is widely noted for being in the vanguard of narrative form in legal scholarship, a technique also utilized by Derrick Bell, and specializes in the essay genre. Feminist and critical race theories are left-oriented movements, and they both have an intriguing theoretical and social connection to critical legal studies.

Critical legal studies, given its origins at the beginning of the diversity period, was at first an overwhelmingly white male movement. As progres-sive-leaning women and people of color joined the academy, however, many were naturally drawn to political and theoretical positions associated with critical legal studies. Critical feminist theory, critical legal studies, and criti-cal race theory share a belief that society is not regulated by the neutral hand of law, but that law is a socially constituted product dictated by social-power dynamics—be they gender, economic status, or race. While critical legal studies emphasized class dynamics, “fem crits” and “race crits” were more

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interested in identity politics. This belief in the social situatedness of law led crits to be suspicious about claims of neutral rationality in law given the ter-rain of unequal power distribution. The political dimensions of law cannot be ignored.

The Law and Economics/Crit Divide and the Construction of Contemporary American Legal Theory

In large part law and economics, at least as originally formulated in the early 1970s, and critical legal theory represent opposite responses to the law/poli-tics debate opened up by the legal realists. The theme of law and economics is that politics can be circumscribed by deploying the scientific techniques of economic analysis as the principal tool for doing legal theory—separating law from politics. The crits argue that there is no way to neatly separate law and politics. Crits do not take the position that the law is all politics. There are agreed-on “rules of the game.” And those who actively oppose the crits, including law and economics adherents, for the most part do not argue that law is totally devoid of politics. The argument is over how broadly to draw the lines of demarcation. The different movements represented in this collec-tion draw the lines in various and complex ways. Moreover, the line drawing is not uniform within movements, with individuals and subgroups within movements taking varying positions on the matter. These complexities fre-quently surfaced in the interviews. As a prelude to the interviews, it is useful to delve more deeply into how the participants and their movements fit into the law/politics narrative—with a particular focus on methodology.

When one drills down deep into the theoretical core of neoclassical eco-nomics, the unifying belief is in the individual (be that personal or in the form of a business entity) as the basis for analysis. In addition, there is an overlay that the individual is a rational actor. This assumption allows for models of the economic world to be constructed with mathematical ele-gance. The norm of economic efficiency justifies constructing legal rules to conform to the model because decisions based on the efficiency criterion inure to the public good. This was the basic position taken by Richard Pos-ner in Economic Analysis of Law and defended by him in large part under the guise of wealth maximization (which resembles utilitarianism) through the early 1980s. Post-1980s, Posner has since taken up the mantle of pragma-tism—defending free market economic policies as justified because of their practical benefits.

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Rights theorists approach the world from the perspective of political philosophy but share with neoclassical economists the view that the indi-vidual is the locus of analysis. But the rights theorist imbues the individual with an assortment of rights. What this set of rights entails may differ wildly depending on the particular position of any individual rights theorist. John Rawls established the terms of debate regarding contemporary discourse in political philosophy concerning rights theory with the 1971 publication of his pathbreaking work, A Theory of Justice. The leading rights theorist in law over the last few decades is Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously (1977) articulates his vision of the crucial nature of rights in soci-ety, and is a frontal assault on legal positivism and utilitarianism. Bruce Ackerman utilizes the rights approach in conjunction with the ideal of citi-zenship to argue that each individual in the United States has a right to a certain set of economic goods, linking his rights approach to constitutional jurisprudence. This is a rationalist point of view because it is a claim based on rights as being inalienable (determined as a matter of citizenship), and constitutional jurisprudence logically derived therefrom. Ackerman has come to recognize the significant role that the politics of citizenship can play in our evolving view of the Constitution, but he rejects the crit view of law as politics.

There is a strand of conservative constitutionalism that is also rights based. The lineage in terms of contemporary political theory can be traced to Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). Charles Fried’s libertar-ian constitutionalism is centered on the idea that each individual has a set of liberty interests. The rights to liberty set constitutional constraints on the government’s ability to impinge on individual liberties. This form of consti-tutionalism is conservative because it argues for a limited government role in the economic and social sphere. Its adherents situate rights as being founda-tionally determined and legal rules flowing logically from them (analogous to the left-liberal formulation), because the liberty interest is taken as the absolute basis for law. There is another form of conservative constitutional-ism that is not represented in this set of interviews, one that is more Burkean in nature. An originalist constitutionalist believes that the basis of constitu-tional decision making has to begin with the original intent of those who produced the document. We can determine appropriate constitutional law by digging up its original meaning.

Of course, there is a rich history of philosophical speculation related to law that is not focused on constitutional jurisprudence. Post–World War

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II philosophy is marked by the rise of analytic philosophy (which includes under its rubric logical positivism). One of the chief goals of analytic phi-losophers is to apply rigor and discipline to the discussion of concepts. The analytic philosopher dissects arguments in order to clarify statements. Ron-ald Dworkin used this approach in thinking about rights, and Rawls’s The-ory of Justice and Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia have a decidedly ana-lytic bent. Jules Coleman comes out of the analytic tradition, and his work in tort law theory is built on careful consideration of what we mean when we talk about justice. Coleman’s discussion of corrective justice in tort law demonstrates that the reach of philosophy extends beyond debates regarding constitutional rights. Coleman has also been a central figure in the debates surrounding legal positivism, an approach to conceptualizing law that runs counter to the rights view. Legal philosophers share a belief that the rigors of rational analysis will sharpen our understanding, and they are skeptical of critical claims of law as politics. They provide an analytic counterweight to Posner’s ideal (as articulated in the 1970s) of efficiency. Both Coleman and Dworkin criticize core tenets of law and economics. But they have a funda-mental disagreement regarding the nature of law—with Dworkin rejecting Coleman’s legal positivism. Coleman’s evolution toward pragmatism (away from an analytic view) is symptomatic of the shift in Anglo-American phi-losophy. (A similar shift can be found in Rawls, Nozick, and Dworkin.) But he is careful to formulate his vision of pragmatism in a way that does not pull him too far over the political divide. This is evident in his criticism of both Richard Rorty—perhaps the most popular neopragmatist, and a darling of the left—and what Coleman identifies as “skeptical or cynical” versions of pragmatism.

Law and society adherents are concerned with making discoveries that shed light on legal questions. There are a multitude of approaches taken in this endeavor, but a heavy emphasis is placed on social science research. Austin Sarat’s background and scholarship typifies the law and society model. He has a PhD in political science, and attended law school subsequent to establishing himself as a political scientist at Amherst. His scholarship attempts to get at the “truth” of law by performing inquiries (ethnographies) related to legal topics such as the death penalty. The idea is that you cannot really understand how the death penalty works in the United States unless you delve into the details regarding players in the sys-tem. Law and society scholars adopt a view of legal theory as a rational enterprise in the sense that they believe that excavating facts is central to

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the process of revealing the truth regarding the law’s operation and impact. But there is also a social constructivist strand of law and society, repre-sented by the “later Sarat” as reflected in our interview, which is more open to taking into account the cultural dimensions of law and has some affinity with critical legal studies.

Post-1960s critical legal studies scholars were in the vanguard of question-ing the claim that law is an apolitical enterprise. For crits this often meant uncovering the economic/class dynamics underpinning law. We see this move in Morton Horwitz’s critical histories, which have a decidedly eco-nomic determinist bent. Horwitz works to discredit both Whig accounts of the common law unfolding without political influence and liberal notions of progress. While crits would by and large reject crude Marxist claims regard-ing economic determinism, they do focus on the role that economic interests play in constructing legal policy. There is also a strand of critical legal studies that is more attuned to cultural criticism. Duncan Kennedy calls on post-modern theorists such as Michel Foucault in his cultural critique of law as false consciousness.

Feminists reject the idea that one can understand or transform law without keeping track of gender dynamics. Catharine MacKinnon has championed the view that male patriarchy is at the heart of law and the societal infrastructure writ large. In particular, the way the law handles issues related to sex (particularly rape and pornography) underscores that it is a male-centered enterprise. Drucilla Cornell takes a similar view of the world, but is flexible in her analysis of male/female sex dynamics. These differences make themselves present in the two radically divergent approaches that MacKinnon and Cornell take concerning prostitution. Cornell’s postmodern view regarding the play of life leads her to reject the position that there is a fixed male/female hierarchy that necessarily renders sex work an act of subordination. MacKinnon views prostitution as part of the sexist continuum. Cornell argues that it can actually be a manifestation of women as “sexuate” beings, and refuses to substitute her vision of the “good life” for those engaged in prostitution. Cornell’s solu-tion to the subordination of sex workers is union organization in an effort to empower women. Her sense of play is symptomatic of postmodern theorists who call into question any modernist quest to objectify and ren-der static social relationships (including law). (Duncan Kennedy shares a similar view on the plasticity of law.) The play of social construction is evident in Cornell’s work, calling on Frantz Fanon, on the existential

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dynamics of race. Cornell has not only been influential in utilizing post-modern insights in her own work but also played a historically signifi-cant role in introducing Continental philosophers, Jacques Derrida most famously, to the United States.

The civil rights movement and 1960s racial politics both cleared the way for professors of color to become faculty members at law schools in non-trivial numbers, and also provided inspiration for theorizing the impact of race on law. Ironically, the book most recognized as ushering in critical race theory, Derrick Bell’s And We Are Not Saved, is actually a text that questions the viability of a civil rights–oriented approach to legal reform, a reoccurring theme in critical race theory. Bell interrogates the notion that civil rights laws were enacted for the benefit of black progress. In fact, those laws would not have been placed on the books, according to Bell, unless they served the interests of whites. The activist component, with tinges of black nationalist sentiment, of critical race theory is revealed in the protest movement to have the subject taught at Harvard Law School in 1981. There is also an effort to concretize experiences of people of color and their relationship to law, focusing on existential concerns. Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks comes to mind. This desire to illustrate existen-tial realities is evident in the “storytelling” genre in critical race theory as utilized by Derrick Bell, Richard Delgado, Patricia Williams, and others. Williams utilizes the essay form to explore the deep interior of identity on multiple levels. Kimberlé Crenshaw, another prominent critical race theorist, does the same type of work through her intersectionality analy-sis. Williams’s postmodern inquiry encapsulates race, gender, and cultural insights similar to those of Drucilla Cornell. The very form of her work, the essay (frequently with first-person subject position), presses against apolitical accounts.

21st-Century Legal Academia

All the legal academics interviewed for this project have their roots in the 20th century, but the seeds of the movements and theories they are associated with have blossomed into the 21st century. In the latter part of the 20th century, you could identify the major players and movements in the legal academy. Today the legal academy is much more dispersed and specialized. The specialization trend had its origins in the 1980s. It was then that we began to see a proliferation of PhD-qualified legal academics.

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Specialization is a product of the increasingly interdisciplinary and theo-retical nature of the legal academy generally. There is also, as evidenced by some of the interviewees, a growing trend toward adopting a neoprag-matist position regarding the use and place of theory. This move to prag-matism, which has a tendency to soften the hard edges of theoretical con-flict, may be further evidence of what Duncan Kennedy refers to as the death of legal theory. While I appreciate Kennedy’s position regarding the decline of “grand” legal theory, and this book may be viewed by some as memorializing the event, I have a slightly different view regarding future developments.

In these interviews, I discuss with the participants my view that, because of increased specialization, the legal academy does not have broad intellec-tual conversations that cut across disciplines. Of course, this contradicts the trend of scholars occupying interdisciplinary fields. Increasingly, debates are being waged within relatively narrow subdisciplines that are “interdisciplin-ary” but scarcely affect the larger academic community. While the move-ments represented by the interviewees for this book began the interdisciplin-ary trend, their impact was all the more significant because they spoke across the legal academy and beyond. This accounts for the fact that many of the interviewees can fairly be described as public intellectuals. The conversation across perspectives, even if it at times came in the form of angry shouting, helped forge some of the most meaningful ideas produced in the legal acad-emy to date. In the end, this is the true legacy of the era. Today’s specialists move forward, within their particular subspecialty, doing (borrowing from Thomas Kuhn) “normal science” in the theoretical fields established by the previous generation. Legal theory is not dead. However, it is increasingly siloed. Will the next generation have such a rich field of theoretical inquiry to till?

We might correctly dub this moment in legal academe the era of neo-pragmatism. However we label the current intellectual enterprise in the legal academy, its origins are found in, and it is in the end shaped by, the gen-eration represented in this text. It is for this reason that we (speaking as one who is forty-seven years of age at the writing of this essay and straddles this generational fault line) owe such a great debt to the contributors to this book, and can still today learn much from their theoretical, historical, and political musings.

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Notes 1. Peter Osborne, A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals (Routledge 1996); Raoul

Mortley, French Philosophers in Conversation (Routledge 1991); Theo Pinkus, Conversa-tions with Lukács (MIT Press 1975, orig. pub. 1967).

2. Sartre by Himself (1979, Alexadre Astruc and Michel Contat directors). 3. Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights: The Battle between Gov-

ernment and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (Simon & Schuster 1998).

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