Gavel Gamut
By Jim Redwine
(Week of 31 August 2015)
LEGAL THEORY
Now admit it; the title of this article draws you in as a moth to a flame. You cannot wait to delve into the arcane mysteries of ancient concepts such as The Rule Against Perpetuities and The Rule in Shelley’s Case. You know, I had a similar reaction in law school.
As I sat in Jerome Hall’s (1901 – 1992) final class as a professor at Indiana University’s School of Law in Bloomington in 1970 and heard him regale all the fresh young minds, my thoughts ever turned to the exciting areas of comparative legal philosophy.
And since I had that great pleasure I want to share it with you. So let’s begin with a walk down the ivy-covered halls of Bloomington’s limestone corridors.
First you will note that unlike the rest of the university where no one is expected to take root in the classrooms, the Law School has lockers for each student, in the basement, of course. There you kept the instruments of survival: canned tuna, soda crackers, and three dollars in emergency relief funds for when you spent the entire weekend trying to figure out just what some professor who had never practiced law meant when he, they were all men then, meant by Latin terms applied to convoluted fact scenarios.
With Professor Hall it was even more esoteric as he taught legal philosophy, not some real subject such as contracts. Hall had no use for facts or cases. He cared only about legal theory and impressing us with his personal relationships with other “famous†legal theorists we, nor hardly anyone else, had ever heard of. For example, do you know who Karl Llewellyn (1893 – 1962) was? Me neither, but Professor Hall made sure we all knew that Hall had known Llewellyn personally. The only Llewellyn I knew owned a bakery in my hometown. It turned out the baker was not the legal scholar; I got no credit when I identified him as such.
Professor Hall wrote several books and you know how people who write books are. They drive you crazy trying to get you to buy and maybe even read their books. With Hall he knew he was going to sell at least twenty books every semester. I have found his books to be excellent examples of heavy reading; I have moved them several times.
Well, enough of this interesting background of legal theory. Next week we will dive deeply into the exciting area of competing legal philosophies such as Legal Positivism and Natural Law. Now, don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get as much out of the discussions as I did.
