Jack should get a transcript of Amartya Sen’s forthcoming lecture on the theory of justice at the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford University on the 30 May 2007 at 5pm which I am attending.

Once again, not quite right. The posting to which you were responding was actually a little bit more complicated than you appear to have noticed the first time around. My question was, either you’ve had some legal training, in which case why not remind me of a salient argument with an important Rawlsian contribution?, or you haven’t had training, in which case how can you be so confident about the law? You apparently do consider yourself to have some sort of training/knowledge/expertise, so in that case I ask again, why not remind me of a salient legal argument that bears traces of Rawlsian influence? As for your comment about doors and gates, I suppose you are now trying to affect a kind of modesty that has been sorely lacking to this point. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone who follows what you write could possibly be taken in by that sort of thing.

You raised the question regarding my training, knowledge and/or expertise. I answered it as best I could. I’ve yet to master anything in the academic world, but I do a pretty good job of hanging a door, building a gate….

Thanks for your comment. Since I made my original post, it has occurred to me that it’s extremely difficult to define the contours of law, just as it’s difficult to define the bounds of philosophy. A possible set of problems with the definition you offer is that it is underinclusive – because there is a lot of law that law professors don’t do – as well as overinclusive – because some law professors legitimately venture off into other areas in which they are interested. Thus, I am not sure whether legal theory or normative jurisprudence are best thought of as parts of law proper or rather as separate disciplines unto themselves. Even if you do think that legal theory/normative jurisprudence are parts of law proper, they are relatively small parts of the legal curriculum at even elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. As a result, the fact that Rawls is highly influential in l.t./n.j. would not warrant the stronger conclusion that he is highly influential in law more generally speaking. At the risk of repeating myself, in my experience the vast majority of law professors, lawyers, and judges are influenced by Rawls in an extremely limited way. That is about all that I ever meant to convey when I said that rumors of Rawls’s influence in law are overstated.

(In response to Patrick S. O’Donnell, I suspect I would not be alone in saying that I have no interest in looking up your other blog posts, writing to law professors to ascertain your qualifications, or reading any of your supposedly forthcoming publications. Ditto regarding your strange invitation to browse through your documents or look through your books “if I’m ever out [your] way.” Given that your formal training is in Islamic thought, I hope you’ll let me conclude this pathetic exchange by saying how impressive it is that you’ve also managed to master political philosophy and law.)

The claim you were responding to in your original comment above was Dworkin’s claim that Rawls has been enormously influential in, among other disciplines, the discipline of law. I take it that the ‘discipline of law’ includes, broadly speaking, everything legitimately done by law professors (‘disciplines’, after all, are sociological entities). That, I take it, includes at least legal theory, if not also philosophy of law and normative jurisprudence. Thus, even if you’re correct that Rawls has not been influential in ‘law’ construed narrowly as ‘legal argument’ (by which, I take it, you mean something like ‘the kind of argument that could be made in court’); this doesn’t support your original claim that Rawls has not been influential in law conceived more broadly as an intellecutal discipline. It is, I think, in this latter sense that Rawls’s importance to law is widely regarded as obvious.

I have no formal legal training whatsoever. I’m rather well read in philosophy of law and legal theory however. You can look up my contributions to the PrawfsBlawg research canons project here: http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/research_canons/index.html or earlier drafts of some of the material at Larry Solum’s Legal Theory blog. If you want evidence of my knowledge in this area you can write to Professor Dennis Patterson at Rutgers School of Law, Camden, and Dept. of Philosophy, New Brunswick, or to Professor Frank Pasquale at Seton Hall Law School, or to Professor Jeff Lipshaw at Suffolk Law School. The latter did an embarrassing profile of me here: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2007/03/who_is_patrick_.html#comments

I have a contract for a dictionary of terms in philosophy of law and legal theory, have published a piece on stare decisis and have a forthcoming essay on social norms and law. I have other things forthcoming but will make them known a bit closer to publication if anyone is interested. My formal training is in Religious Studies and most of what I’ve published is in ‘Islamic Studies.’ Many of my academic interests are well-covered in an essay I wrote examining ‘critical thinking’ pedagogy for the online journal, Radical Pedagogy. With all due modesty and respect for those in the profession, experience has taught me that I know as much or more about the ‘state of the discipline’ (with regard to legal theory and philosophy of law) from the outside looking in than those who are counted among its members.

Professor Freeman has written and informed me that the reference in the Rawls volume should have been to the book edited by Pranab Bardhan and John E. Roemer: Market Socialism: The Current Debate (1993).

Defining influence is a little bit tricky, but what I meant to suggest was that if Rawls has had a major impact on law, it would be because he has made a substantial contribution to important legal arguments. Unfortunately, I simply found no evidence of any such contribution during the three years that I spent in law school. I’m not sure what O’Donnell thinks there is consensus about – the vast majority of law professors, lawyers, and judges would probably say that Rawls influences their work to a very limited degree. Even the quote from Michelman doesn’t really appear to make the point O’Donnell wants; for all I know, the idea of the quote is that Rawls helps us to criticize SCOTUS opinions from a moral (not legal!) point of view. Although this might not be obvious to all, “law” differs from “legal theory” and “philosophy of law” as much as “science” differs from the “philosophy of science”: what I deny is that Rawls had much impact on law; I’d have to think about it some more before I could say what his impact has been on the meta disciplines. (Compare: While Thomas Kuhn had a major impact on the philosophy of science, I don’t think that anyone would claim that he influenced physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) In the last line of my previous post, the suggestion was that the idea that Rawls is very influential in law seems to me to stem in part from the fact that his work is discussed and appealed to in a few seminars at elite law schools. But to infer from that fact the further proposition that Rawls is influential generally, you’d have to conflate those seminars with the legal world as a whole, i.e. have a very narrow conception of law.

O’Donnell mentions that he did not attend HLS. I wonder: does O’Donnell have any legal training at all or is everything he thinks he knows about the law got at second hand? If the former, why doesn’t he just remind me of a salient legal argument with a Rawlsian premise? If the latter, how can he be so confident about the state of a discipline of which he is not a member?