[lbo-talk] Noam on intellectuals

[Tim Francis-Wright]

Jerry Monaco wrote:
> As far as professors are concerned.  I am not interested so much in
> analyzing professors in general, but rather the institutions that we
> belong to and what they bring us to do.  Duncan Kennedy wrote a
> wonderful pamphlet, slightly influenced by Gramsci and existentialism
> called "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic
> Against the System".  Now he is a star legal "professor" and all but
> he does not refrain from what you might call "professor bashing" in
> this book.  Only the main point is to analyze law schools and how they
> fit into our legal institutions and to society at large.  A similar
> "polemic against the system" could be written about all of our
> educational institutions and about the scholarly journals of all type
> that are part and parcel of "higher learning."  I don't see how such
> polemics and analyses are anything but pro-educational even though
> they might be "anti-intelligentsia", to some extent.
> 

Well, one of the main goals of critical legal studies is to examine the
underpinnings of what stands for law, and hence to examine what is right
and wrong about legal education.  So the professor-bashing in Kennedy's
work is more a bashing of the system in which the professor works, I 
think.

I temped for a couple of weeks for a tax law professor who was in the
same suite of offices as Duncan Kennedy, around 1990.  Before my stint
was up, he gave me a copy of that excellent pamphlet.  Anyway, one
version of the work in question is here: http://snipurl.com/1a0k3

And his website does indeed have a host of essays on issues that Jerry 
brings
up (www.duncankennedy.net).

--tim francis-wright