My Greatest Benefactions

This occasion is a cause for me to relax the natural modesty that has otherwise restrained me from describing these accomplishments more widely. I am one of the greatest benefactors of the University of Puget Sound School of Law. I did not comment when the new Law Center Building was named after Mr. Norton Clapp, nor did I resent it. Mr. Clapp is a generous and dedicated man, and he well deserves each of the many honors that have been bestowed upon him. Nevertheless, as will soon be very evident, the appropriate name for the Center was a much closer question than has ever been publicly admitted. I claim entire credit for introducing Fred Tausend to the University of Puget Sound School of Law. I was a mere Assistant Professor at the Law School at the time. I had been invited on leave to the University of Chicago Law School and, presumably, as a reward for my achievement, was instructed that if I wanted the leave, I would have to find a replacement for my Antitrust class

The Growth of Interdisciplinary Research and the Industrial Structure of the Production of Legal Ideas: A Reply to Judge Edwards

This brief response will attempt to repair these various deficiencies, though only in part because of the difficulty of the subject. It will try to explain more fully the rise of interdisciplinary legal research and will sketch the broader structure of the production and dissemination of new ideas about law and the legal system. The relationship between legal education and legal practice implicates an understanding of the market for legal ideas. To describe ideas as the subject of a market, of course, has become conventional. In my view, however, the market metaphor most typically distorts our understanding of the issue, because few of the typical characteristics of economic markets are present in the dissemination of ideas. This essay will try to approach a description of a market, nevertheless, by illustrating similarities between the production of legal ideas within law schools and the bar and the production of intellectual property in more familiar industrial contexts. The description will be far from comprehensive, but it will suggest that the alleged disjunction between legal education and practice, the focus of Judge Edwards\u27 essay as well as of my own earlier writing, does not adequately account for the broader process at work. The essay will also suggest that many of the developments in modern legal education that Judge Edwards so severely criticizes11 actually support, rather than conflict with, the broader values that he espouses

A Principled Approach Toward Insurance Law: The Economics of Insurance and the Current Restatement Project

The American Law Institute ( ALI ) initiated a project in 2010 to propose the Principles of the Law of Liability Insurance ( Principles ). A Principles project by the ALI is different from a Restatement of Law, for which the ALI is better known. A Restatement seeks to restate the common law of the fifty U.S. jurisdictions in systematized form. The ALI was organized many decades ago to achieve this ambition, in particular to counter the criticism that varying common law principles in the many different states in the U.S. made the law confused and contradictory across the states. The ALI has been successful and has published many volumes of Restatements over the succeeding years, generally disproving this point. A Principles project of the ALI is different. A Principles project proposes to state the law as it should be, presumably as discussion material or talking points for lawyers and academics to address over some time in the future

Gossiping About Ideas

I do not know whether Tom Wolfe has reviewed Rawls\u27 A Theory of Justice, and I cannot remember a serious critique of Habermas or Horkheimer in recent issues of People magazine. It is this novel intellectual form, however, which the multi-talented Bruce Ackerman refines in Reconstructing American Law. The book\u27s bold objective is to account for the intellectual sources responsible for the expansion of federal governmental activity since the 1930\u27s. But Ackerman is not interested in the inherent strengths or weaknesses of the justifications for government action, nor quite in the influence of these ideas on the actual growth of government. Instead, Ackerman is concerned with how policymakers, particularly lawyers, have talked about these ideas. The subject of consequence to Ackerman is the relationship over the last fifty years between justifications for government action and the content of what Ackerman calls, variously, law-talk, lawstuff, legal discourse, legitimated [legal] conversation, and the new language of power. This unusual approach represents a new and significant synthesis of the central theme of Ackerman\u27s scholarly work. In 1977, in the first book of the series, Private Property and the Constitution, Ackerman described two world views competing for control of modern legal culture-views which he called ordinary observing and scientific policymaking. According to Ackerman, each conception sought to dominate the characterization of modern legal issues by imposing different constraints on legal language. The battle between them would determine control over the linguistic practices of a special group of conversationalists . . . trained as lawyers. Ackerman illustrated the hypothesis by showing that the various and confused approaches toward interpreting the takings clause were only different elaborations of one of the two competing linguistic methods