Academic Questions, Adam Smith, Albert Venn Dicey, Alliance Defense Fund, Aquinas, Baudrillard, Blackstone, C.S. Peirce, Camille Paglia, Carl Schmitt, Carol Iannone, Charles E. Rounds, Chaucer, Chief Justice John Roberts, Daniel J. Kornstein, David F. Forte, David French, Derrida, Emerson, Eve Sedgwick, Foucault, Freud, George W. Dent, Grotius, Hayek, Hobbes, Hudson Institute, James Kent, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, John Dewey, Jr., Judith Butler, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Kafka, Kant, Law School, Legal Education, Lino A. Graglia, Locke, Louis Menand, Machiavelli, Marx, Mel Bradford, Michael I. Krauss, Milton, National Association of Scholars, Nietzsche, originalism, Richard Hooker, Richard Weaver, Robert H. Bork, Shakespeare, Stanley Fish, William James
In Arts & Letters, Humanities, Law, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Pedagogy, Teaching, Writing on July 27, 2011 at 2:23 pm
The latest issue of Academic Questions (Summer 2011: Vol. 24, No. 2) devotes most of its content to legal education. Published by the National Association of Scholars, Academic Questions often features theme issues and invites scholars from across the disciplines to comment on particular concerns about the professoriate. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the NAS.) Carol Iannone, editor at large, titles her introduction to the issue “Law School and Other Tyrannies,” and writes that “[w]hat is happening in the law schools has everything to do with the damage and depredation that we see in the legal system at large.” She adds that the contributors to this issue “may not agree on all particulars, but they tell us that all is not well, that law school education is outrageously expensive, heavily politicized, and utterly saturated with ‘diversity’ mania.” What’s more, Iannone submits, law school “fails to provide any grounding in sound legal doctrine, or any moral or ethical basis from which to understand principles of law in debate today.” These are strong words. But are they accurate? I would say yes and no.
Law school education is too expensive, but its costs seem to have risen alongside the costs of university education in general. Whether any university or postgraduate education should cost what it costs today is another matter altogether.
There is little doubt that law schools are “heavily politicized,” as even a cursory glance at the articles in “specialized” law journals would suggest. These journals address anything from gender and race to transnational law and human rights.
But how can law be taught without politicizing? Unlike literature, which does not always immediately implicate politics, law bears a direct relation to politics, or at least to political choices. The problem is not the political topics of legal scholarship and pedagogy so much as it is the lack of sophistication with which these topics are addressed. The problem is that many law professors lack a broad historical perspective and are unable to contextualize their interests within the wider university curriculum or against the subtle trends of intellectual history.
In law journals devoted to gender and feminism, or law journals considered left-wing, you will rarely find articles written by individuals with the intelligence or learning of Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, or Eve Sedgwick. Say what you will about them, these figures are well-read and historically informed. Their writings and theories go far beyond infantile movement politics and everyday partisan advocacy. Read the rest of this entry »
biology, Emerson, evolution, Harold Bloom, imagination, Joan Richardson, Jonathan Edwards, mediation, mind, natural history, nature, Pragmatism, theory, thought
In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Communication, Creative Writing, Information Design, Literary Theory & Criticism, Pragmatism, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics on December 9, 2010 at 9:22 pm
If pragmatism is, as Joan Richardson claims, “thinking about thinking” (79), and if Emerson is, as Richardson claims, a pragmatist, then we might ask ourselves what intellectual tradition Emerson appears to appropriate and modify. What are Emerson’s “moving pictures” (the title of Richardson’s chapter on Emerson), and how do they receive and transmit thought and theory? Richardson seems to suggest that, for Emerson as for Jonathan Edwards, nature and imagination are mutually reinforcing and inextricably tied concepts. Emerson works out of Edwards’s paradigms while altering them to fit his own historical moment. Emerson mimics not only Edwards’s intellectual framework—his theories—but also Edwards’s diction and syntax (63). Put differently, Emerson imitates a concept while imitating the vocabularies through which that concept passed down to him.
What makes Edwards and Emerson unique is their turn to nature to make sense of the “transcendent.” Just as Edwards looks to spiders and light to aestheticize his theology and exhilarate his congregation, so Emerson looks to nature to spiritualize the human mind. Both men observe and then internalize the natural world to refine their thinking about thinking. For Emerson, however, the human mind is itself an organism—one hungry for knowledge. The mind is not so much “the room of the idea” as it is a living being with an appetite for thought (67). Emerson employs and seeks out metaphor to organize this thought—one might say to satiate his ravenous intellectual appetite—and he does so because he realizes “the seminal role played by image” (68). The world, for Emerson, is full of semiotic possibility, and one can arrive at truths about reality through the study of metaphor. Science, after all, uses signs and symbols—i.e., metaphors—to test and decode the natural world (see, e.g., Richardson on the “metaphor intrinsic to biology’s emergence as a distinct field”) (69). Read the rest of this entry »
America, Emerson, History, Shakespeare, Text, Thomas Cartelli, Whitman
In American History, Arts & Letters, Emerson, Literary Theory & Criticism, Shakespeare, Walt Whitman on August 9, 2010 at 9:55 am
In Repositioning Shakespeare, Thomas Cartelli situates Whitman’s Shakespeare in contradistinction to Emerson’s Shakespeare.
The phrase “Whitman’s Shakespeare” is, in a way, an odd construction because Whitman did not seek to claim “ownership” of Shakespeare so much as he sought an “appropriation and critical transformation” of Shakespeare (32). Cartelli submits, in fact, that Whitman “brought a contentiously critical approach to bear on his assessments of Shakespeare” (30).
Although Cartelli pays lip-service to Emerson’s ambivalence about Shakespeare, he concludes that Emerson transformed the Bard of Avon “into a virtual founding father” by attempting “an act of wishful appropriation in which the (literary) model that cannot be superseded is annexed by the (political) model that supersedes” (33).
Cartelli thus seems convinced that Shakespeare shaped Whitman’s and Emerson’s thought, but he seems unsettled about how and why.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 