Legal Commentary

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.