With the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock fast approaching, I’ve been getting nostalgic these last few days. Not nostalgic about the concert, since I wasn’t there. But nostalgic about the music, which always takes me back to when I was first introduced to the music in college. Luckily, my I-pod has plenty of good stuff from the period: Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby Stills & Nash, Sly & the Family Stone. (As I type this, Grace Slick is belting out “White Rabbit” in the background. Although lately I’ve been getting into a Gillian Welch version recorded at this year’s Newport Folk Festival.) Anyway, oddly enough, thinking about Woodstock, and listening to this music, has gotten me thinking about the legal academy.
To be more precise, Woodstock has gotten me thinking how little I know about the legal academy. What was going on at law schools when the hippiedom was at its peak? Obviously there was a lot going on in the world then. It was the year after the riots at the Democratic Convention, not to mention the student riots in Paris. It was a time of Vietnam protests and the moon landing and the Stonewall Rebellion. Clearly the academy was involved in the Civil Rights Movement–President Johnson had just signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 the year before–but what about Woodstock, that three-day festival where dress codes and drug laws and draft codes were rejected, where a type of natural law reigned, and where Jimi Hendrix, in re-imagining the Star-Spangled Banner, also re-imagined America? Were any of the attendees law students? Law professors? Future law law professors? I’m assuming that when we were law students, we had a few law professors who were former hippies championing peace and love, but who were they? Who were the professors who smoked pot and dropped acid and practiced free love? And were there professors who brought this spirit, this sense that the world could be made anew, this counterculture sensibility, into their scholarship? I know about Yale Law Professor Charles A. Reich, who in 1970 published The Greening of America, but who else is there?
Let me know. I hate to think of us as belonging to a staid profession.
Posted by Bennett Capers on August 12, 2009 at 08:53 AM
Comments
I’m just a few years younger than Jeff, yet in addition to the great music and the Vietnam war, when I think of the 1960s what comes to mind are the sorts of thing covered in these books:
Breines, Wini. Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968: The Great Refusal. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989 ed.
Carson, Clayborne. In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
Case, John and Rosemary C.R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops, Communes & Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.
Cohen, Robert and Reginald E. Zelnick, eds. The Free Speech Movement: Reflections on Berkeley in the 1960s. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002.
Day, Mark. Forty Acres: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers. New York: Praeger, 1971.
Flacks, Richard. Making History: The Radical Tradition in American Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Katsiaficas, George. The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1999.
Matthiessen, Peter. Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution. New York: Random House, 1970.
Mattson, Kevin. Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
Meier, August and Elliot Rudwick. CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.
Melville, Keith. Communes in the Counter Culture: Origins, Theories, Styles of Life. New York: Morrow Quill, 1972.
Miller, James. “Democracy is in the Streets:” From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Morris, Aldon D. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change. New York: Free Press, 1984.
Payne, Charles M. I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995.
Sale, Kirkpatrick. SDS. New York: Random House, 1973.
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Aug 12, 2009 4:39:14 PM
I don’t think I’d romanticize either Woodstock or the late ’60s. I remember being 15 in the summer of 1969 and seeing a Woodstock advertisement in the window of what we used to call a “head shop” (now defined by Wikipedia “a retail outlet specializing in drug paraphernalia related to consumption of cannabis, other recreational drugs.” I can’t be sure, but it may have been the one where I bought my psychedelic, multi-colored “Light My Fire” poster, which I hung in the alcove of my room, just behind the beaded entry way and the yellow glass orbs I had swinging there. I also recall a fair amount of paranoia about the possibility of getting drafted and sent to Vietnam. I have nostalgia about a lot of things, but not about being a teenager from 1967 to 1974.
Posted by: Jeff Lipshaw | Aug 12, 2009 3:26:03 PM
My law prof colleague here at Toledo Dan Steinbock was at Woodstock. As to how many of the activities you describe above he partook in, you would have to ask him.
Posted by: Joseph Slater | Aug 12, 2009 2:59:02 PM
I’m with Paul: Kalman’s book is great for this.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Aug 12, 2009 2:24:30 PM
Although I’m not able to help answer your interesting question, I rather suspect yours is indeed a “staid profession.” And I’d be quite surprised to learn of more than a handful law professors with an antinomian and/or strong Leftist sensibility during the 1960s. Nonetheless, we can certainly find political justification for same, as in Rudi Dutschke’s notion of a “‘a long march through the institutions'” of power to create radical change from within government and society by becoming an integral part of the machinery” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudi_Dutschke).
Perhaps as a follow-up question we might ask in what ways the countercultural ethos and New Left ideas and practices of the 1960s were taken up by some members of the legal academy and legal profession, be it in the CLS movement, “democratic lawyering” (see this post and thread: http://www.legalethicsforum.com/blog/2009/05/piomelli-on-democratic-lawyering-.html#comments), cause lawyering (Sarat and Scheingold), and so forth and so on.
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Aug 12, 2009 9:52:59 AM
You’ll want to read Laura Kalman’s book on Yale Law School in the Sixties. Terrific read.
Posted by: Paul Horwitz | Aug 12, 2009 9:43:04 AM