In this unique volume, James Hackney invites readers to enter the minds of 10 legal experts that in the late 20th century changed the way we understand and use theory in law today. True to the title of the book, Hackney spent hours in conversation with legal intellectuals, interviewing them about their early lives as thinkers and scholars, their contributions to American legal theory, and their thoughts regarding some fundamental theoretical questions in legal academe, particularly the law/politics debate. Legal Intellectuals in Conversation is a veritable “Who’s Who” of legal thought, presented in a sophisticated yet intimate manner.
A history of Harvard Law School in the twentieth century, focusing on the school’s precipitous decline prior to 1945 and its dramatic postwar resurgence amid national crises and internal discord. By the late nineteenth century, Harvard Law School had transformed legal education and become the preeminent professional school in the nation. But in the early 1900s, HLS came to the brink of financial failure and lagged its peers in scholarly innovation. It also honed an aggressive intellectual culture famously described by Learned Hand: “In the universe of truth, they lived by the sword. They asked no quarter of absolutes, and they gave none.” After World War II, however, HLS roared back. In this magisterial study, Bruce Kimball and Daniel Coquillette chronicle the school’s near collapse and dramatic resurgence across the twentieth century. The school’s struggles resulted in part from a debilitating cycle of tuition dependence, which deepened through the 1940s, as well as the suicides of two deans and the dalliance of another with the Nazi regime. HLS stubbornly resisted the admission of women, Jews, and African Americans, and fell behind the trend toward legal realism. But in the postwar years, under Dean Erwin Griswold, the school’s resurgence began, and Harvard Law would produce such major political and legal figures as Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Elena Kagan, and President Barack Obama. Even so, the school faced severe crises arising from the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, Critical Legal Studies, and its failure to enroll and retain people of color and women, including Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Based on hitherto unavailable sources—including oral histories, personal letters, diaries, and financial records—The Intellectual Sword paints a compelling portrait of the law school widely considered the most influential in the world.
No study of Black people in America can be complete without considering how openly discriminatory tax laws helped establish a racial caste system in the United States, how they were designed to exclude blacks from lucrative markets and the voting franchise, and how tax laws extracted and redistributed vast sums of black wealth. Not only was slavery nearly a 100% tax on black labor, so too was Jim Crow apartheid and tax laws specified the peculiar institution as “negro slavery.” The first instances of affirmative action in the United States were tax laws designed to attract white men to the South. The nineteenth-century Federal Tariff indirectly redistributed perhaps a majority of the profits from slavery from the South to the North and is the principle reason the Confederate states seceded. The only constitutional amendment obtained by the Civil Rights Movement is the Twenty-Sixth Amendment abolishing poll taxes in federal elections. Blending traditional legal theory, neoclassical economics, and a pan-African view of history, these six interrelated essays on race and taxes demonstrate that, even in today’s supposedly post-racial society, there is no area of human activity where racial dynamics are absent.
Who are the new Chinese intellectuals? In the wake of the crackdown on the 1989 democracy movement and the rapid marketization of the 1990s, a novel type of grassroots intellectual emerged. Instead of harking back to the traditional role of the literati or pronouncing on democracy and modernity like 1980s public intellectuals, they derive legitimacy from their work with the vulnerable and the marginalized, often proclaiming their independence with a heavy dose of anti-elitist rhetoric. They are proudly minjian—unofficial, unaffiliated, and among the people. In this book, Sebastian Veg explores the rise of minjian intellectuals and how they have profoundly transformed China’s public culture. An intellectual history of contemporary China, Minjian documents how, amid deep structural shifts, grassroots thinker-activists began to work outside academia or policy institutions in an embryonic public sphere. Veg explores the work of amateur historians who question official accounts, independent documentarians who let ordinary people speak for themselves, and grassroots lawyers and NGO workers who spread practical knowledge. Their interventions are specific rather than universal, with a focus on concrete problems among disenfranchised populations such as victims of Maoism, migrant workers and others without residence permits, and petitioners. Drawing on careful analysis of public texts by grassroots intellectuals and the networks and publics among which they circulate, Minjian is a groundbreaking transdisciplinary exploration of crucial trends developing under the surface of contemporary Chinese society.
Recent political science research into the American legal academy has been ‘captured by conservatism’—this research has framed the institutional and ideological developments occurring within the law schools over the past forty years solely through the prism of modern conservatism. As a result, political scientists have ignored the political struggles of one of the most important legal reform movements of the 1980s and overlooked the hope for leftist reform that existed within American law schools during this period. Critical Legal Studies and the Campaign for American Law Schools tells the story of the critical legal studies movement. This formidable movement sought to fundamentally reconstruct law schools, train a new generation of leftist lawyers, and replace the dominant form of legal consciousness governing the American legal system. Instead of projecting a fatalism onto leftist reform, this book relies on extensive archival research and interviews to illuminate the radical potential that lived in the American legal academy of the 1980s. The critical legal studies movement was a towering presence in the law schools, and its legacy continues to hold out political possibilities and reform lessons for leftist legal scholars today.
For more than a century, law schools have trained students to 'think like a lawyer'. In these times of legal crisis, both in legal education and in global society, what does that mean for the rest of us? In this book, thirty leading international scholars - including Louis Assier-Andrieu, Marianne Constable, Yves Dezalay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bryant Garth, Peter Goodrich, Duncan Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, Charles Sabel and William Simon - examine what is distinctive about legal thought. They probe the relation between law and time, law and culture, and legal thought and legal action; the nature of current legal thought; the geography of legal thought; and the conditions for recognition of a new 'contemporary' style of law. This work will help theorists, social scientists, historians and students understand the intellectual context of legal problems, legal doctrine, and jurisprudential trends in the current conjuncture.
Many Americans believe that the United States is in decline. They see a country that has become unrecognizable: where individuals are reduced to their race, ethnicity, or sexual identity; where children are indoctrinated into radical ideologies; where anti-semitism has become widespread. This book explains how all of these ills are rooted in Marxism. To be sure, it is not Soviet Marxism, but a Marxism that was shaped by European intellectuals, adapted and refined by America’s student radicals of the 1960s, and diffused throughout the culture as those student radicals became professors, community organizers, and leaders. The end goal of these NextGen Marxists is expropriation, redistribution, central planning, and collectivism. They are working toward nothing less than the cultural transformation of the United States—and they have partially succeeded. But NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It is infused with optimism. It reveals the dark inner workings of the radical left’s destructive agenda in the United States in order to teach Americans how to fight back. The authors share their conviction that the best days for the United States are still ahead of us if every day Americans can work together to restore sanity and make America the great beacon of freedom once again.
The academic disciplines of law and sociocultural anthropology have a long but at times contentious history of drawing on each other in order to study and understand law and human experience in its diverse manifestations. This volume provides an innovative and engaging format by giving established and emerging scholars from diverse jurisdictions the opportunity to discuss and reflect upon what they consider to be a ‘leading work’. The collection offers a unique, multi-perspectival reconsideration of the intellectual history of the field whilst also addressing issues that are at the core of interdisciplinary legal research. Contributions shed light on the changing nature of cross-disciplinary research and collaboration, trace how disciplinary understandings of normativity have cross-fertilised each other, and reflect on choices taken within research on law and anthropology along a continuum of theoretical reflection, critique, engagement, and practical application. The book elaborates on the nature and the boundaries of law and anthropology research, as well as on its likely future development in light of the insights shared by contributors on their chosen leading works. The book will make fascinating reading for researchers and academics in both law and anthropology. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org This sweeping book details the extent to which the legal revolution emanating from the US has transformed legal hierarchies of power across the globe, while also analyzing the conjoined global histories of law and social change from the Middle Ages to today. It examines the global proliferation of large corporate law firms—a US invention—along with US legal education approaches geared toward those corporate law firms. This neoliberal-inspired revolution attacks complacent legal oligarchies in the name of America-inspired modernism. Drawing on the combined histories of the legal profession, imperial transformations, and the enduring and conservative role of cosmopolitan elites at the top of legal hierarchies, the book details case studies in India, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, and China to explain how interconnected legal histories are stories of both revolution and reproduction. Theoretically and methodologically ambitious, it offers a wholly new approach to studying interrelated fields across time and geographies.
In this timely book, the first comprehensive study of the modern American public intellectual--that individual who speaks to the public on issues of political or ideological moment--Richard Posner charts the decline of a venerable institution that included worthies from Socrates to John Dewey. With the rapid growth of the media in recent years, highly visible forums for discussion have multiplied, while greater academic specialization has yielded a growing number of narrowly trained scholars. Posner tracks these two trends to their inevitable intersection: a proliferation of modern academics commenting on topics outside their ken. The resulting scene--one of off-the-cuff pronouncements, erroneous predictions, and ignorant policy proposals--compares poorly with the performance of earlier public intellectuals, largely nonacademics whose erudition and breadth of knowledge were well suited to public discourse. Leveling a balanced attack on liberal and conservative pundits alike, Posner describes the styles and genres, constraints and incentives, of the activity of public intellectuals. He identifies a market for this activity--one with recognizable patterns and conventions but an absence of quality controls. And he offers modest proposals for improving the performance of this market--and the quality of public discussion in America today. This paperback edition contains a new preface and and a new epilogue.
