Learned Hand to Ronnie Dworkin: F*** you

In recent years, even after John Sexton stepped down (up?) from NYU's law school deanship to assume NYU's presidency,  NYU has endured repeated drubbings from Brian Leiter and others for its rampant Sextonism.  But Sextonism, which is the hyperbolic puffery about a school's place in the world, is distinct from law porn -- the phantasmagoria otherwise experienced as the onslaught of glossy brochures sent by various law schools to every faculty member in the country during what Paul Caron calls the US News Silly Season.  (Caron and Bernie Black believe it was Pam Karlan who coined the term law porn, and Leiter who spread the meme.) 

Various people oppose not only Sextonism, but also law porn, because it so often encompasses Sextonisms.  It's important to keep them distinct though.  Not all law porn is pernicious exaggeration;  as Vic Fleischer reminds us with his qualifed defense of law porn, some degree of law porn may be desirable because it facilitates law school branding, e.g., Yale is for squishy theory, and Chicago is for law and econ. 

Branding, shmanding.  Sometimes, I say, law porn should be embraced simply because it titillates the mind.  Unsophisticated as this defense might be, what prompted this post is that I have spent substantially more than an hour enjoying the very law porn produced by NYU.  As some of you have probably seen, Dean Revesz's minions recently sent out a substantial NYU Law magazine with a focus on its law and philosophy offerings.  The cover story is a lengthy profile of Ronald Dworkin by Adam Liptak, the NYT national legal correspondent.  Regardless of whether you like his work, there's no question that a profile of Dworkin promises to be interesting, even if a bit odd at times (e.g., the photo of Dworkin, the great egalitarian, sailing on the waters off of Martha's Vineyard, where he keeps his third home). 

Indeed, Liptak's profile, which, sadly, is not yet online as far as I can tell, contains the gem of a story recounted by Dworkin about his clerkship with Learned Hand, then 87 years old.   During the clerkship, Hand was busy crafting his Holmes Lectures to be delivered at Harvard.  Hand wanted to push his thesis of judicial restraint -- to the effect that "due process and similarly vague constitutional phrases were essentially unreviewable by the courts," in Gerald Gunther's words.   Dworkin kept saying to his boss that the implication of Hand's thesis would be that Brown v. Board was wrongly decided, a position Hand was loathe to assume in public.  They argued and argued about whether Hand was ducking the issue in the lectures' draft, until Hand said to Dworkin: "Fuck you."  Dworkin described Hand at that moment as having steam come "out of his eyebrows, and he grabbed his yellow pad, and he started to scribble, and he started throwing away and throwing away and throwing away."  Hand, according to Dworkin, "finally in a way ... adopted my view.  But it wasn't the outcome I wanted, because I wanted him to give up his theory."  Speaking of Hand, Dworkin said, "I disagreed with everything he said but he was a very good person to have to argue with."

Sure sounds like it.  In any event, the rest of the issue is actually worth reading in, if not reading through.  And for those who are interested in some of the lore of law and philosophy, the issue has some other treats, in addition to some of the usual pap one expects in law porn at its finest, including several pictures of New York's Most Beautiful Brainiac.   Upon finding out his newest title, Noah had a good quip: it's like being the "tallest mountain in Missouri."

Prawfsblawg: where we really read law porn for the articles, so you don't have to.