Legal Commentary

I hereby commend Neil Gross's sociological study of Richard Rorty, a book that's noteworthy even if you're not particularly interested in Rorty or philosophy and would prefer to think instead about the sociology of law professors and the legal academy. Gross's project is to study the trajectory of an academic's career and thought, and how that trajectory in turn affects and is affected by the institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual worlds with which s/he interacts. Of course this is the stuff of every biography of an intellectual or academic -- if you want to a masterwork of an intellectual biography of a legal intellectual, see, for example, Nicola Lacey's biography of H.L.A. Hart. But Gross is a sociologist and neither a historian nor a philosopher, and his book is not an attempt to ask the question, "Who was Richard Rorty?" Instead, his question is, "What were the conditions that enabled someone to become Richard Rorty?" Inevitably, the answer to this question requires the stuff of biography: profiles of his parents, his upbringing, and education; a sketch of the many stops of his career, from Yale to Wellesley to Princeton to Virginia to Stanford, with points in between; and a precis of his work (which may or may not be entirely accurate -- Gross concedes that he's not a philosopher). So if you're looking for an answer to the first, traditional question, you can find it here, although somewhat inartfully rendered and without great attention to specifically philosophical questions.

But his question is one with broader, and to me more interesting, implications than those of traditional biographies. What are the conditions under which a school or approach comes to dominate a field (in Rorty's case, analytical philosophy), and how does an emerging scholar make her way with and against the grain that school or approach establishes? Although the question is implicit in any biography of a noteworthy academic or intellectual, Gross foregrounds and brings an accessible sociological approach to his answer. One could of course ask that question from the top down, with a history of the field. But a bottom-up approach that views the academy from the perspective of an individual reveals things that are lost in the big picture. Specifically, Gross argues that issues of status and identity drove not only Rorty's success but also his approach. Rorty's apparent intellectual shift "from technically oriented philosopher to free-ranging pragmatist" (p. 15), Gross claims, was as much about internal career shifts and his conception of himself as it was the result of the great revelations of a great mind that a traditional biography would identify. We know and see this in the academic world of our everyday lives -- some are certainly smarter, more creative, and more productive than others, but no one is truly transcendent and everyone must negotiate the institutional structures and carrots and sticks that the academy throws before them. The traditional intellectual biography implies transcendence. The sociological biography foreground the limits of structure and history, and therefore something both greater and smaller than individual genius. Inevitably, to emphasize the sociological aspects of intellectual work is reductive, of course, but I've got nothing against reduction so long as it's well-argued and supported.

So, inevitably, I read this book in relation to the legal academy. For a top-down version of Gross's argument, one could begin with Jack Schlegel's remarkable history of realism's empirical wing, which focused on the institutional identity of law professors and the friction that first-generation empirical scholars faced between their interest in methodology and the constrained epistemology of the pre-war legal academy. That's an essential read if, for example, you're interested in historicizing the current boom in empirical legal studies (and interdisciplinary scholarship generally). Schlegel offers some snapshots of individuals -- his take on Underhill Moore is unforgettable -- but Gross's book suggests an even more all-encompassing biographical vision offers additional insights. Ultimately, I think what's at stake in all the various legal blogosphere arguments about the direction of law schools -- from the influx of PhDs to the rankings controversy, from curricular reforms to rethinking the third year of law school -- is not only the specific issues in dispute but also, as Gross and Schlegel both show, about what it means to be a law professor and a legal intellectual. We make our way as scholars in a strange and fragmented set of institutions and intellectual worlds, attempting to satisfy our individual intellectual and professional preferences within an historical context and institutions that are well beyond our control. What we are presently doing may (if we're among the lucky few) in the future be seen as the stuff of intellectual history; but we all work in institutions that also require sociological study. Compared to the narrative drive of history and biography, sociology is boring, but it's equally important.