University of Wisconsin Law School announcement

University of Minnesota Law School announcement

Al Brophy @ the Faculty Lounge

Howard Wasserman @ Prawfsblawg

Guadalupe Luna @ Nuestras Voces Latinas

Diane Marie Amann @ intlawgrrls

Dan Rodriguez @ Northwestern Law Dean’s Blog

Kevin Johnson @ ImmigrationProfBlog

Feminist Law Profs commentary

Brian Leiter @ Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

Obituary @ Madison.com

I will always remember Jane as being especially welcoming to me when I arrived in Madison.  She reached out to me both professionally and personally, supporting my identity as a newly minted (and very nervous) assistant professor and as a feminist.  We worked together on a project, and she helped me connect to other like-minded scholars interested in gender.  I will always be grateful to her, and she will be sorely missed by so many of us.

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 From Jack Balkin — Yale Law School

I remember when I first met Jane. It was 1990 or shortly thereafter. She had just started teaching, and she was speaking at an academic conference, I believe, about the historians’ brief in Webster, about how historians had to talk about history to judges, and the problems that this raised. She was poised, quiet, confident, charismatic, radiant. I asked Gerald Torres who that amazing person was up there. He said it was a former student, Jane Larson, and that I was quite right, she was indeed amazing. Jane and I became friends at that conference, and over the years, I learned about her erudition, her adventurous intellect, her humor, her graciousness. But now that she is gone, and all too soon, what I remember most is the picture of Jane standing there speaking at that conference, in gauzy brilliance, as if light were streaming from all sides of her. No doubt it still shines where she is now.

From Mary Becker — DePaul University College of Law

 I remember Jane Larson as a member of the Chicago feminist law group, an informal organization consisting primarily of women teaching in law schools or interested in doing so. Jane was an early member of our group. I remember her with fondness and admiration for her many gifts and her values. She was herself a gifted scholar and very supportive of the work of others, especially the women in the group interested in becoming law professors. Jane had a natural elegance as well as an openness to and appreciation for those without such elegance. Jane was charming, fun, a gift to us.

 From Anita Bernstein — Brooklyn Law School

Jane and I started our teaching careers a year apart, both of us newcomers to Chicago.  My immediate impression of Jane was she was so darned nice.  Where did she get the time, I’d wonder, to minister so patiently to anxious students, querulous colleagues, fretful acquaintances, the peeved and the perplexed.  All took comfort from Jane—and took their comfort for granted.  I know I did.

Amazing as Jane was on the niceness front, she soared even higher in her writing.  There are only a handful of great publications in feminist torts jurisprudence.  I benefited from them all, but “Women Understand So Little” is the work from which I learn the most with each reread.

Jane argued back in 1993 that lies told to obtain sex–just like lies told to obtain money–ought to be actionable in court.  A stark and novel idea, with supports (including legal history) beautifully mustered.  I’ve assigned Jane’s article in my seminars.  Usually I mention it in my torts class.  Students respond with a mix of resistance and respect; they leave remembering Jane’s thesis.

If you think Jane was wrong about a tort of seduction, you might be right, but I’d encourage you to ask yourself why.  You’ll be thinking along with Jane.  She understood your doubts.

We’ve lost a thinker with a big heart, a nurturer who shared her profound ideas, and a mother who died much too young.

Memories of Jane — When I first saw Jane Larson as a new law professor at Northwestern in 1990, I thought she was magical.  The way she walked and talked and belonged in her body attracted me at first.  I soon discovered the magical qualities of her intellect.  I never went into a discussion with Jane without emerging with key insights, ones that would never have occurred to me alone.  She looked at every issue from fresh and imaginative perspectives.  The first edition of the casebook on Feminist Jurisprudence I co-authored in 1994 had the immense benefit of her insights, as did everything I wrote during the period we were colleagues.  I was in awe of her article on the tort of seduction, which appeared at about the same time that I was advocating a feminist revival of common law marriage.  Then-dean Bob Bennett referred to us as his “rock stars” after a sketch of Jane appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  We laughed that both of us progressive feminists were advocating a return to common law traditions that had been abandoned in the name of equality.

I treasured Jane as a friend as well. I’ll always remember the furtive way in which we, as two refugees from large law firms who had not quite shaken that work ethic, sneaked away from the law school to attend Wednesday matinees of the play Angels in America two weeks in a row.  Her witty and gracious speech at the retirement party for Bob Bennett brought down the house.  We were always plotting one thing or another, such as the Op Ed we co-authored to advocate appointment of the women who were then magistrate judges in the Northern District of Illinois to the federal district court.  Before too long, a total of three of these women had been appointed to the bench, and we celebrated at each of their installations.  Not among the least of her accomplishments, her encouragement and assistance in writing a personal ad to be published in The Chicago Reader ultimately led to connecting with my wonderful long-term partner and now-husband.

I know from observing her classes on several occasions that Jane was a spectacular teacher.  She really cared about her students and about the subjects she taught.  Students, especially women students, responded by lining up outside her office door to talk, but she could never bring herself to flee so as to get some work done uninterrupted.  It was totally unsurprising that she won the Best Teacher award on more than one occasion.  She was magic for many more people than just me and contributed to so many lives.  I am only just beginning to accept that Jane is no more.  But I’ll always feel grateful – and changed – for having known her.

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From Bob Burns — Northwestern University Law School

I have a strong recollection of Jane’s vitality and creativity.  During her time at Northwestern, she was at the center of the school’s intellectual life.  Faculty members of very diverse perspectives, including some of our most prominent traditionalists, admired her work and her concern for justice.  She was at the heart of many students’ experience of the school and was an award-winning teacher.  Her interests were broad and adventurous.  (I recall an animated and informed discussion at a Christmas party of a recent exhibition of Caravaggio’s paintings…)  It is hard to believe that someone who was so alive is now gone.

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From Charlotte Crane — Northwestern University Law School

Jane had an extraordinary ability to pull people to her and to the things she cared about.  Some might describe her as “charming,” in all senses of the word.  But “charming” is simply too trite a word to use for her power to make a connection with and influence those around her.   She was nothing short of magnificent.  In the classroom, this magnificence meant students thronged to her classes not just to be instructed but to be educated.   In a scholarly debate, it meant that her position would be presented lucidly but passionately.  In daily interactions, it meant that one would easily be pulled into her concerns and suffer discomfort if unable to respond.   She and the energy she brought with her simply could not be ignored.

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From Howie Erlanger — University of Wisconsin Law School

Thoughts on Jane Larson’s Passing  –  The poet Mary Oliver famously asks “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  The question has been my compass these past ten years.  Hearing that Jane Larson passed away brings up the question in bold font, all caps.  What did Jane, a mother, an academic, a feminist, a lawyer, do with her one wild and precious – and short –life?

I wasn’t there for more than a few moments of it.  I’d just graduated from Northwestern when Jane joined the faculty, so I never had her for a class.  But once I got into the academic game, I learned from her immensely.  Her articles tracing complex histories of the tort of seduction and age of consent law, the fabulously titled book Hard Bargains, and work in a seemingly different area, Texas Colonias, showed me how to write from the heart as well as the brain.  Like a duckling learning to swim by following an older one, I read her work to learn not only the substantive material she conveyed with such precision and grace, but also to figure out how I, too, might combine feminism with legal economics, track doctrinal progressions to the social, political and economic contexts in which they occur, and ask questions about what the legal rules should be now.  On the page, and in our conversations, I emulated Jane as I found my own scholarly voice, becoming as deeply influenced by her selection of scholarly topics as by her seeming determination to research and write from the heart with the larger goal of making the world a little safer, and a bit more dignified, for ordinary women.

On a more personal front, I watched with particular interest how she managed to match professional life with family life, plying her with personal questions when she presented a paper, all dignity and visibly pregnant, at the University of Denver, where I used to teach.  The birth announcement, as I recall, just said “a love supreme,” with Simon’s picture and birthday.  Later, when he’d grown to be a toddler, I ran into Jane at a conference.  When I asked after Simon, she told me about taking him to Italy for some academic gig.   I asked how it was to travel and work with a baby around (wondering myself how I would do it, when the time came), and Jane reassured me, enthusing about how “Italians love babies,” and had picked him up on busses and fussed over him wherever they went.   I can still see her eye sparkle, and hear her generous laugh, as she added that, two weeks after they got home, sitting on the kitchen floor, Simon had looked at the cat and said, “ciao, meow!”

I haven’t seen Jane much, these past years, since I too joined the ranks of academics balancing work and raising a child.  But when I do go out of town to present a paper, I think of her when I remember to tuck a picture of my son into conference materials, looking forward to it fluttering out, as a picture of Simon did back in 2001, when I was sitting next to Jane at a commodification conference.  “Oh,” she smiled, as if telling the story of how the picture got in there magnified the pleasure of looking at her son, “I always slip a picture of him in there, to find as a pleasant surprise, while I’m away.”   I will continue to be inspired by her example as a scholar and a person as I write my own book – also, like hers, about love, contracts, and family law — building on her legacy.

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From Len Kaplan — University of Wisconsin Law School

Everyone who knew Jane recognized that she was a gifted teacher who gave of herself well beyond the norm. Everyone who knew of her knew her printed work was first rate and in some cases ground breaking. Everyone who knew her felt the radiance of her smile, her keen intellect and if lucky her friendship.  Everyone who knew her knew she carried the best of the Wisconsin Law School ideal of combining analytic perspicacity with an abiding sense for real world justice.

What we did not recognize was the courage that carried her to the very poignant end.

From Sylvia Law — New York University School of Law

The death of Jane Larson is a horrible, stunning loss. We have not been in touch in recent years and in my mind she is young and vibrant. She contributed so much to our understanding of our law and culture, and had much more to offer.

We met in 1988 or 1989, through our mutual friend, Clyde S. Spillenger.  Both Jane and Clyde came from a professional background in history and were looking for the productive careers as legal academics that Jane found at Wisconsin and Clyde at UCLA.

In 1989, the Supreme Court was poised to over-rule Roe v. Wade.   In 1986, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court held that the constitution of the United States did not prevent Georgia from entering Michael Hardwick’s bedroom and charging him for a crime of sodomy for adult, consensual acts.  Justice White, for a 5-4 majority, relied squarely on history, asserting that to claim that a right to engage in sodomy is “deeply rooted in this nations’ history and traditions is, at best, facetious.”

Hardwick has since been over-ruled.  Our fear was that the version of history articulated by Justice White in Hardwick would be extended to reproductive choice, and more generally to the interpretation of the constitution.

Jane, Clyde, and I organized more than 200 American historians to file an amicus briefs in the Supreme Court cases, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, 1989, and Casey v. Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania, 1992.  Roe was not over-ruled.  Unlike Bowers v. Hardwick, neither opinion relied on history and tradition.

History and tradition are, of course, complex.  Our task was to describe a position on abortion that was consistent with the historical understanding of the broadest number of scholars. As a pro-choice litigator, I wanted the historians to say that the Founding Fathers and the drafters of the 14^th Amendment, correctly understood, were pro-abortion choice.  Jane, Clyde, and the prestigious historians who signed the brief insisted on a more complex, nuanced view of history.  The historian’s brief has had a lasting impact on abortion jurisprudence and constitutional law more generally.

Jane was a delight– sophisticated, knowledgeable, funny, hard-working.  She will be missed.

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From Guadalupe Luna — Northern Illinois University College of Law

From the time I first met her in law school Professor Jane E. Larson remained a cherished friend.  She was an outstanding legal educator who did not hoard her talent but shared it with colleagues, friends and students.

Jane’s scholarship engaged and connected empirical studies with fact based inquiries and in the current language of today promoted experiential teaching methods.  Jane’s awards and recognition as Professor of the Year  underscore the vitality of her legal education approach.

Jane moreover was a fierce and perceptive scholar who could dance around complex legal doctrines without constraint.  Personally it was thrilling to see her challenge the prevailing order on topics of great concern including feminist theory, legal history and Latina/Latino theory.

Whether with students, peers, colleagues or friends Jane encouraged exposing vulnerable and risky intersections hidden from legal analysis.  Jane also dared to go beyond the safety of making mere observations. Through the trajectory of empirical legal studies and history she offered alternatives to offset injury-producing legal consequences.  In turn her dedication and passion promoted possibilities and opportunities for long-neglected individuals and communities.

The jurisprudence of critical thought also benefited from Jane’s scholarship. She helped develop intellectually important scholarship across a spectrum encompassing the marginalized.  Her participation further enriched our understanding with the New Legal Realism efforts.

The awful news of the passing of my dear friend hit me like a lightning bolt but then evoked achingly tender memories. We shared many adventures, but our early 1990s field research in the colonias of south Texas remains among the best.

We knew globalization was harming border communities, contrary to what its promoters promised.  Fran Olson’s fact-based inquiries on globalization’s impact on the maquiladoras at the U.S.-Texas border inspired us. We in turn sought answers regarding law’s role on the irregular housing conditions in that region.

We explored causal relationships between law with the real facts and inequalities plaguing colonia land use patterns and private land use agreements. We conducted interviews with colonia residents, activists and state officials.  At all times always aware of the privilege of how the “rule of law” worked in promoting the unsafe conditions in the colonias.

Thereafter Jane produced a quality, forward-thinking substantive article.  She exposed the factual links and consequences the lack of regulations facilitates in housing communities. Demonstrating elusive gaps between law and inequality Jane additionally sought empowering colonia residents in their quest for fee-simple ownership.  It was exciting because her efforts further led to law students assisting residents with their recording documents.  Even most recently Jane had contributed to yet another publication on the colonias.

With Jane’s successes there were costs for her inquisitive and generous nature that “curiously” targets forward-thinking trajectories.  Those early years remind me of the current political tempo where the nation is witnessing politicians promoting top-down mandates aimed at eliminating workers’ rights or eroding the few rights of women.  Such harm demonstrates the consequences of simplistic approaches that ignore causal relationships and forgo accountability.  It illustrates what happens when complex societal needs are reduced to simplistic formulas that purposely ignore “outliers” or alleged “unknown externalities.”

Now more than ever it is exciting beyond compare to witness the vitality of the new legal realism efforts she helped inspire.  More frequent challenges are emerging in legal scholarship, gloriously connecting obscure linkages and seeking accountability from the prevailing order.  Against the costs Jane sustained, the new legal trajectories of the present are demonstrating with yet greater frequency the validity of her path.

I’ll always have a large collection of wonderful memories of my friend Jane Larson.   She was a scholar who left her law school office to test elegant theories in the all-too-real world of ordinary people.   Her “Free Markets Deep in the Heart of Texas” challenges the claim that the world would be better if governments just went away.   She looked at a place where this had happened, and she found that none of the theorists who made this argument would want to live there.   I’ve quoted a statement of hers several times:   “Viewed from the perspective of legality and equality, the subject of informality is a minefield.   Even so, lawyers and legal scholars must take the lead in formulating policy responses to informality.”

I got to watch her as a teacher about two years ago.   Jane joined me to conduct my Sociology of Law seminar when we dealt with the police response to domestic violence.   She had written about these problems of informality, and we had a spirited discussion.   When the class ended, the students applauded Jane.

A few years ago, a number of people from the Law School attended a Sonny Rollins concert at the Overture Center in Madison.   We expected a fine evening from Rollins, one of the masters of jazz.   We got more than this.   It was one of those rare special performances when a great artist went beyond anything we could have expected.   I drove Jane home, and the two of us knew that we had experienced something truly special.    She pushed me toward more modern jazz, and I tried, with some success, to turn her attention to Duke Ellington.

When Jane was at the top of her game, she was fun to be with or talk to on the telephone. She was smart and she had a great sense of humor.   I loved listening to her puncture balloons and expose stupidity and greed in high places.    Of course, she died far too young, and we cannot bring her back.   But she left many good memories behind.

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From Beth Mertz  — University of Wisconsin Law School

How to do justice to a life cut short, a scholar whose work was left unfinished, a colleague and friend who was unable to complete much of what she once imagined doing?  As news of Jane’s death has spread across the law school world, many in our community are struggling to make sense of this loss – to find meaning in something that seems senseless.

I find guidance in Jane’s steadfast commitment to those without voice – to the people whom law is supposed to serve, but who are so often erased.   I vividly remember her scorn for the cowardice that silences us when we should speak out – a cowardice that somehow does not automatically diminish when we have more power and privilege.  Oddly, the more we walk the corridors of power, the harder it sometimes becomes to speak out – to question accepted untruths, to unsettle the smug certainty that can accompany privilege.  Jane had many opportunities to take an easier road, to shortcut the truth — and she refused.  As a junior faculty member, I was inspired and stunned by the risks she took.   It is so tempting to fit in, to say the things that will earn you prizes, to spend your time on things that bring renown.  It is harder to do labor-intensive fieldwork to find out what law looks like on the ground.  It is harder to spend hours counseling students who feel they don’t fit in, or mentoring colleagues who are tempted to leave the academy because it is such an alien place.  It is harder to break the mold in your thinking, fighting rather than swimming with the tide.  But without people like Jane, who are willing to do that kind of work, the law school world is in danger of losing touch with its core mission and ideals.  We need the people who keep us honest, although we too often fail to hear or honor them.

Happily, Jane found a home and a voice at Wisconsin, where the ideals she cherished were shared by many in the wider law school community.  Her work in feminist legal history, her anthropological vantage on poverty and land use, her burning desire to build a more just legal system, continued.  To these concerns she added a new project, one on which a number of us worked with her, which became known as the “New Legal Realism.”  Jane’s vision was a key impetus for this project.  With her characteristic combination of intellect and practical wisdom, she challenged many of us to think about why some kinds of empirical knowledge go unheard within the legal academy.  How can it be that decades of empirical sociolegal research focused on “law-in-action” remain largely ignored by law professors?  And why is it that the kinds of scholarship that can take us closest to the lived realities of ordinary people in our society are so often slighted in the legal academy?  Surely a bunch of law professors with expertise in social science could think this puzzle through, could push the law to use all of the methods and findings available to address difficult problems.  And surely we owed it to our profession to take our best shot at addressing this puzzle – however quixotic the effort might seem.

And so, in characteristic Jane-fashion, she (along with a number of others) helped to move a group of us into yet one more effort to bring theory into action, empirical knowledge into practice.  We knew that we were working without many of the usual prerequisites for success.  But we had the power of ideas (she would remind us), and deep roots in interdisciplinary scholarship, and thus an openness to inclusion – multiple methods, multiple perspectives, multiple fields, multiple voices.  And we had Jane’s voice nudging us on – scornful of the cowardice that silences us when taking up unpopular causes, laughing at the smallness of academics who take themselves so seriously that they stop trying to break the mold.

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From Thomas Mitchell –University of Wisconsin Law School

I came to Madison in 1996 to pursue an LL.M. as part of the William H. Hastie Fellowship program.  It was my good fortune to have had Jane Larson assigned to be my advisor.  To be candid, I found our early meetings to be somewhat intimidating.  It was obvious from our first meeting that Jane had a brilliant mind and that she would be completely committed to helping me develop as a legal scholar.  In our regular meetings she would ask me one penetrating question after another — many of which I simply did not understand — about my research and about drafts of different chapters of my thesis. As a result, I often had to do additional research just to grasp the concepts which formed the basis of the questions she had asked me.  I have kept copies of her markups on drafts of various chapters from my thesis and am amazed to this day at the breadth, detail, and rigor of her comments.  My experience with Jane is not unique.   At Wisconsin, Jane was a strong and consistent supporter of the Hastie Fellowship program and served as advisor to other Hastie fellows including Stacy Leeds, now Dean at the University of Arkansas School of Law.  Still others who were then aspiring law professors or law professors in the early part of their careers benefited greatly from Jane’s mentoring.

Jane did not simply live in her head, but also sought out ways to help those whose problems she studied who lacked power or influence.  She was the initial faculty advisor for a unique externship program that was jointly run by our law school and the University of Wisconsin’s Land Tenure Center. That program placed law students for the summer in poor, mostly rural communities so that those students could assist people who had a variety of challenges with respect to property ownership.  She encouraged others who yearned to be similarly engaged but who were worried about the potential negative professional costs they might suffer from doing anything but conventional academic research.  I hope that her work will inspire many others to be engaged scholars who have the courage to do work that is not only of high quality but is also meaningful to people both inside and outside of legal academia.

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From Julie Nice — University of San Francisco School of Law

I had the great fortune of spending time with Jane when she arrived to begin teaching at Northwestern during my clinical teaching fellowship.  Everyone was abuzz about Jane’s astonishing analysis of the tort of seduction.  During this time a rather lively group of students and teachers were meeting regularly to discuss law and politics as part of a group we called Feminists for Social Change.  Jane wasn’t much of a joiner.  But whenever she participated in these events, her presence in the room was palpable.  We could feel her there, listening intently, observing carefully, and always thinking deeply.  When she spoke up, which wasn’t often, her gentle cadence disguised a typically trenchant analysis.  Time stopped while everyone absorbed whatever idea Jane had posed. This phenomenon recurred several years later when Martha Ertman and I persuaded her to come to Denver for a symposium. When Jane spoke, again, everyone listened, relishing each of her generous insights.  And when she threw back her head in joyful laughter at our house party afterward, all seemed right with the world.  I wonder now if Jane knew how much we all admired her.  I don’t know the details of her personal journey.  But many of us know the toll it takes to be a pioneer, opening space for others to follow.  Maybe Jane was not a joiner, but she was very much a pioneer.  She could make time stop.  She could make space open.  Without Jane here, all is definitely not right with the world.  Perhaps the best tribute to her pioneering spirit is for those of us who follow to pass Jane’s gifts forward.

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From Victoria Nourse — University of Wisconsin Law School

Jane Larson was a brilliant individual and an energetic founding member of new legal realism.   Her creativity was exemplified in her insights on a variety of foundational issues in tort and property law, among other subjects.   Her work on the border between Texas and Mexico confronting living conditions far below the poverty line exemplifies the “law in action” strain of new legal realism in which one learns to engage real life problems from studying the problems “on the ground.”   Her intellectual spirit and bravery will be missed.

Jane was an extraordinary presence at Northwestern Law School on so many levels.  She was a gifted teacher, who worked so hard at it that she made it look easy.  She prepared detailed notes as part of her preparation and turned them face down before the class started.  She wanted to engage the students, and she did not want anything to interfere with that—including her own notes.  Northwestern students appreciated the high quality of her teaching, as evidenced by her receipt of their highest teaching award.

Jane was a wonderful colleague, who cared deeply about the institution.  She worked hard to help us move in positive directions, with great energy and dedication.  Her enthusiasm and commitment brought many of us along on important initiatives.

Jane’s scholarship reflected an abiding concern for the oppressed, from those living in colonias in Texas to the lives of women.  She moved easily from theory to practice on the ground.  Her trips to Texas reflected her willingness and ability to look closely at the harsh realities of life in those communities and to use her scholarship to address the conditions the residents experienced.

From Clyde Spillenger –  UCLA School of Law

The Living Fire      I have never known anyone else quite like Jane.  She was blessed, and cursed, with a superabundance of those human traits that fill us with hope:  superb intelligence, emotional intensity, grace and loveliness, a pen for poetry and a voice full of music, an endless appetite for knowledge and wisdom, unmatched empathy, rage at the injustices meted out daily to so many, an intuitive understanding of both the beauty and the fragility of life.  She laughed gigglier giggles, and nurtured fiercer devotions, than anyone I’ve known before or since.  I learned something lasting from practically every conversation I had with Jane, even on subjects (from jazz to American history) that I had imagined I knew well.  Well, Jane knew more.  It never bothered me.  She always wanted to share, not to show off.

One of my sharpest memories from the years during which we practiced law together in Washington, D.C. is of Jane’s elegance in the art of living.  I benefited continually from her joyful immersion in the flavors of life.  She knew where the good food and wine were and where to find the choicest live music.  Dinner and conversation with Jane was a rare pleasure, and an excellent way of separating a young associate from his wages.  Particularly vivid in my mind is the image of Jane carrying to her office, each Monday at 8:30 a.m., a bouquet of flowers to set on her desk for the week.  (Since my office was the professional equivalent of a bachelor’s refrigerator, this made a strong impression on me.)  She explained to me the importance of doing nice things like that for oneself, to guard the soul against the wintry elements of daily life.  Since that day I’ve been mindful to give myself flowers from time to time, if only figuratively.

Life’s moral demands seemed to make a harsher claim on Jane than they do for most of us.  She didn’t necessarily believe in exempting others from those claims, and this meant that close friendship with her could be as challenging as it was nourishing.  To be drawn within Jane’s ring of fire was to experience her vitalizing love and devotion, but also to encounter high standards for how to treat people and how to meet our obligations to the world outside.  More than anyone else I’ve known, she strove authentically to live out the creed “the personal is political.”  Try doing that sometime.  Most of us discover as we grow older that it is easier to pronounce a credo than to live by it; in the words of Billy Joel, we find that just surviving is a noble fight.  That software, however, had never been installed on Jane’s machine.  It hurts me to know that her proud and unwavering adherence to her beliefs could be a source of suffering as well as inspiration.

One day Jane called my attention to an LP recording she owned of Martin Luther King’s best-known speeches.  She marveled, she said, at the way in which King’s entire being seemed to have been occupied by a larger purpose – the way in which his own life, and the quest for social justice, had become one and the same thing.  She didn’t draw any explicit parallels, but I see now how much of this convergence existed in Jane as well.  Laughter and play were a large part of her life, but underneath, always waiting, were the demands imposed by her fierce empathy with those who had been injured and her unshakeable commitment to opposing wrong.  She once said to me, half (but only half) in jest, “I get tired of always having to be Joan of Arc.”  There was a touch of melodrama as well as self-mockery in that – Jane quite enjoyed speaking truth to power – but I knew I was implicated in what she said; we all were.  Jane had a God-given ability to sense, and to seek redress for, the pain in others; it’s uncomfortable to have to acknowledge that I (like others, I’m sure) was her co-conspirator, unconsciously but willingly delegating to her tasks for which I might have assumed my own share of responsibility.

For my thirtieth birthday, Jane gave me a book of Edward Hirsch’s poetry, and she called my attention particularly to a poem of Hirsch’s that is now well known, “Wild Gratitude.”  By way of reflecting on the eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart, Hirsch shows how every living creature can “teach us how to praise” because of the miracles they perform daily under our very noses.  Her appreciation of that verse, and her affection and generosity in bestowing it on me, were so Jane.  I’m sure it never occurred to her that one day I would blink through tears and somehow locate my own wild gratitude – gratitude that I had been blessed, all too briefly, to share in her journey, as she wreathed herself each day (to use Hirsch’s words) in the living fire.

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From Gerald Torres –  University of Texas School of Law

Jane Larson  —   I was new to the University of Minnesota as well as to the twin cities and a climate that could charitably be called bracing. At the time, the U, and especially the Law School, was alive with ideas and personalities that made it a special place. You could have a conversation with E.P. Thompson or Jean-François Lyotard or sit with Catharine MacKinnon among others for extended periods of debate. The intellectual ferment was palpable and it affected the students, the best of whom became colleagues in inquiry. One of these was Jane Larson. Remembering Jane is like remembering a kaleidoscope. Her energy, ideas, ways of phrasing things were always a source of delight, as was the way she challenged received notions and especially power. She took inquiry seriously and because she was studying law, she took the law and its claims and its power seriously. She was never a frivolous critic.

It was her love of life, her intellectual seriousness and her visceral antipathy towards injustice that led her to participate in starting the Journal of Law and Inequality rather than take the safer route to the Law Review to which her class standing entitled membership. It was a choice that would come back as a question raised by potential academic employers: why didn’t she serve on the law review? That she had bigger fish to fry was never an appropriate response. Moreover, little did I, or perhaps she, know that the qualities that made her so wonderful to be around and such a lively mind would also be liabilities. But perhaps she was merely experiencing the gendering of power that she investigated as a scholar. I remember the chairman of the appointment’s committee at a school where she was interviewing calling to talk about her. (I was one of her recommenders.) He began by telling me what a “sparkling, brilliant, absolutely riveting talk she gave.” He then retreated into self-doubt. Perhaps the brilliance blinded us, he wondered, maybe “she had just seduced us all.” I paused, and I asked the fellow whether I could repeat to him what he had just said. I then did and asked if, maybe, he wanted to rephrase. The conversation limped along the best it could (the actionable inquiry hanging about like a bad smell) and I knew that Jane would be both invaluable and threatening for reasons that were evident in the best of her work.

Her article on the tort of seduction almost seems like it had to be written after that conversation, but, of course, I only told her about the conversation later, when she was well on her way as a scholar. That article is a model of care and honesty, and I have recommended it to many. Her book with Linda Hirshman, Hard Bargains, is similarly a model of both well researched history and incisive argumentation. Both works problematized the question of sex and gender relations by locating the provisional answers given by law and then ruthlessly questioning those answers. When Jane turned her attention to the claim that the market alone can solve the problems of the poor, she chose not to pretend this was a question that could be answered by history or logic alone. Instead there was a natural experiment going on today along the southern border of Texas that was worthy of investigation. Her work in the colonias (with some of my colleagues here at Texas) revealed the ways in which land tenure and the bargains it entails have always reflected exogenous power, and yet the law might still be changed to move the fulcrum a millimeter closer to the balancing point. Deciding to spend a summer in the airless, humid heat of the Rio Grande Valley should have been evidence enough of her seriousness, but that she chose to go back again and again and to dig among the documents and to meet and interview the residents, to listen, really listen, were hallmarks of her work. We visited together in Austin on a couple of her trips and as the sweat dripped off the end of my nose she acted as though the summer was the best time to be in a place where the heat makes even lizards beg for mercy.

I should have known all this about her, however; the evidence was always everywhere to be seen. When she got back from traveling in Muslim countries she could give an account that revealed her capacity to imagine her way into the lives of others. It was this skill or perhaps this talent that gave her the openness and compassion that made her a great teacher, an engaging and supportive friend and a brilliant scholar.  She had what Keats and Unger called “negative capability”.  She could reject the false necessity that the institutions we inhabit seem to demand, and she could envision what life where injustice was not taken for granted might entail. She could also see the bounded nature of critique and thus was always subjecting her own insights to the acid bath of her intelligence. Yet when she settled on a position you knew she had thought it through.

Of all of these virtues perhaps her sense of humor and her laugh are what remain most palpable. She was serious, but not self-serious. Her humor and sense of the absurd were often the sharp edge of the blade that cut through the cant and self-importance too often encountered. I remember many of her jokes and observations, but I won’t recount them here, sometimes half the joy is in the hearing and I am not certain they would translate well to the page. Her vocal inflections, facial expressions and occasionally wild gesticulation were always part of the story and part of the pleasure. Though I knew her from the time she was a one-L she always seemed a colleague and soon, a friend, the kind we all might wish to have known.

Edelman, Lauren B., Erlanger, Howard S., and Land, John. 1993. “Internal Dispute Resolution: The Transformation of Civil Rights in the Workplace.” Law & Society Review 27:497-534.

Quinn, Beth A. 2000. “The Paradox of Complaining: Law, Humor, and Harassment in the Everyday Work World.” Law and Social Inquiry 25:1151-1185.

Marshall, Anna-Maria. 2003. “Injustice Frames, Legality, and the Everyday Construction of Sexual Harassment.” Law and Social Inquiry 28:659-689.

Marshall, Anna-Maria. 2005. “Idle Rights: Employees’ Rights Consciousness and the Construction of Sexual Harassment Policies.” Law and Society Review 39:83-124.

Albiston, C. 2005. “Bargaining in the Shadow of Social Institutions: Competing Discourses and Social Change in Workplace Mobilization of Civil Rights.” Law and Society Review 39(1): 11-50.

Albiston, C. 2007. “Institutional Perspectives on Law, Work, and Family.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 3: 397-426.

Wayne, J. H. and B. L. Cordeiro. 2003. “Who is a Good Organizational Citizen? Social Perception of Male and Female Employees Who Use Family Leave.” Sex Roles 49(5/6): 233-246.

COLLECTED ARTICLES:
New Civil Rights Research: Rights Consciousness and Claiming in the United States, edited by Benjaming Fleury Steiner and Laura Beth Nielsen: Dartmouth/Ashgate Press.

EXAMPLES OF articles about what workplace practices matter and what happens within organizations:

Kelly, Erin L., and Alexandra Kalev. 2006. “Managing flexible work arrangements in US organizations: formalized discretion or ‘a right to ask’.” Socio-Economic Review 4:379-416.

Kalev, Alexandra, Frank Dobbin and Erin Kelly. 2006. “Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies.” American Sociological Review 71(4):589-617.

Kalev, Alexandra and Frank Dobbin. 2006. “Enforcement of Civil Rights Law in Private Workplaces: Compliance Reviews and Lawsuits Before and After Reagan.” Law and Social Inquiry 31(4) (December).

Kelly, Erin L. 2010. “Failure to Update: An Institutional Perspective on Noncompliance with the Family & Medical Leave Act.” Law & Society Review. 44 (1): 33-66.

SOME OLDER RESEARCH on fathers and parental leave:

Malin, Martin H. 1993-94. “Fathers and Parental Leave.” Texas Law Review 72:1047-1095.
Malin, Martin H. 1998. “Fathers and Parental Leave Revisited.” Northern Illinois University Law Review 19:25-56.

EXPERIENCES OF WOMEN in the legal profession:
Janet Rosenberg, Harry Perlstadt, & William R.F. Phillips, “Now That We Are Here: Discrimination, Disparagement, and Harassment at Work and the Experience of Women Lawyers,” 7 Gender & Society 415 (1993).

AUDIT STUDIES of who gets hired despite discrimination laws:
S.J. Correll, S. Benard, I. Paik, “Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?,” 112 Am. J. Sociol. 1297 (2007).

Devah Pager, “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” 108 American Journal of Sociology 937 (2003).

Elinor Ostrom, for example, combines field case studies and experimental lab work in her research.  Using this combination, she contested longstanding assumptions about the possibility that groups of people could cooperate to solve common pool problems (as opposed to being regulated by the state or governed by the market).   Check out her Nobel Prize presentation at:

http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1223&view=1

And check out the following interview with Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom, in which they discuss the importance of examining institutional contexts when performing economic analyses.  There is a nice exchange toward the end about how much economists will miss if they ignore the knowledge offered by scholars in other fields.

http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=1223&view=1

Both Ostrom and Williamson agree that “top-down” panaceas or “cookie cutter” approaches to policy problems don’t work.  They believe that policymakers need to give local people a chance to shape the systems used to allocate resources and resolve disputes.  Sometimes, Ostrom points out, local solutions can be the most efficient and effective options.

This is a point of view that fits very well with anthropological research, which has for some time shown us the logic of local systems of knowledge — and the damage that can be done when “solutions” to problems are imposed from outside or above without adequate consultation.

THE NEW GENERATION OF REALISTS …. NOW JOINING us in NLR Conversation are KT Albiston and Riaz Tejani.

KT is a Professor of Law at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, where she teaches in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program.  She has degrees in psychology and sociology from Stanford as well as both a J.D. and a Ph.D. from Berkeley.  She practiced law at the Legal Aid Society of San Francisco, where she worked on issues in employment law related to gender discrimination and work/family policy.   Her research focuses on the relationship between law and social change, with particular emphasis on how institutions shape the meaning of law in particular social settings, and how law relates to broader social processes that sustain systems of power and inequality.  For example, she studies rights mobilization, the role of public interest law organizations in bringing about social change, and how technical legal rules have unintended consequences for the development of law.  KT is a compulsive fiction reader, probably because her sister is a librarian, and procrastinates with literature ranging from Richard Powers to Edith Wharton.

Riaz Tejani is a lawyer and anthropologist interested in the capacity of law under conditions of globalization to conceal and hide what is going on.  Based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork in France, his first book manuscript looks at the role of multiculturalism in the failed European Constitution–a failure with comparative lessons for students of American federalism and immigration law.  His current research explores the long term rapprochement between anthropology and academic law and contemplates the use of ethnographic theory and methods to understand doctrines of Tort law in their living, practical context. Riaz holds a Ph.D in Anthropology from Princeton University  and a J.D. from USC, and is Assistant Professor at the Phoenix School of Law.  When not teaching he has been seen recording and performing with the indie rock group “The French Semester.”

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AN OLDER GENERATION OF REALISTS: Richman on Jerome Frank

Steven Richman, Edgar Lee Masters and the Poetics of Legal Realism, 31 Cal. W. L. Rev. 103, 108 (1994) wrote:

Jerome Frank, in his culminating work Courts on Trial specifically addressed the question “Are Judges Human?” Legal rights are not rule-intensive, but rather, they are a function of what will happen in a particular court as a result of a particular lawsuit, which witnesses will lie, and so forth. Facts are fluid. They are what the jury determines them to be and are, at most, guesses. Not facts, but subjective facts lead to decisions, and Frank argues that perhaps only seventy-five to eighty percent of contract cases can be predicted to be resolved in accordance with actual principles of law. In other words, Frank rejects the proposition that legal rules govern, and sets forth his “realistic” view, that only the particular lawsuit establishes rights, and not pre-conceived rules. Judges and juries are themselves fallible witnesses of the fallible witnesses testifying before them. He refers to legal philosophy or jurisprudence as “legal magic.” Legal rules do not control the trial courts since they cannot, no matter how intelligent the judge, control the subjectivity of the fact-finding process. . . .

Frank divides the so-called realists into two camps: rule-skeptics (in which he places Llewellyn) and fact-skeptics (in which he places himself). The problem with the rule-skeptics is their limited experience or emphasis upon trial courts. As a “fact skeptic,” Frank goes so far as to argue that legal education should include studying the effect of judicial corruption. The basic thrust, then, of the realists in the 1920s and 1930s was that “law is indeterminate.” They were united in terms of their focus away [*109] from rules and on individual judicial decisions. Their contribution, still debated today, was that law should be studied in terms of what is going on in the real world and not simply in a theoretical exposition of how law “ought” to function.

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Excerpt from Karl N.  Llewellyn, THE BRAMBLE BUSH (p. 89-9)

(Originally published in 1930 and then reissued in 1950):  These are lectures attempting to introduce the students at Columbia Law School to the study of law.  “[T]he first craft of law a man must learn is the craft of the law-student; and to that one the lectures as written attempt to give both body and meaning.”    [Note that there were almost no women lawyers in 1930, and Llewellyn writes about “men” meaning all affected by the law]

***

. . . You find me dealing with “the law” and what it is and does.  I say its center is the action of officials, all law officials — and no sooner say it than I slip off my own platform to land for lecture after lecture in discussion purely of these courts of high review, and what they do.

Surely it is clear that I am damned out of my own mouth.  If, as I claim, what appellate judges do is vastly more important than what appellate judges say, that can be only because importance to other people, to the laymen, to the poor devils to whom they do it, appears to me the primary measure of importance.  And on that basis surely you should ask me:  how many people do appellate courts affect?  For a thousand cases appealed to the court of last resort there are ten thousand which stop at the intermediate court of review.  For a thousand which reach the intermediate court there are ten or twenty thousand which go wholly unappealed.  More; for a thousand cases on trial in the higher courts of trial — the County Court, or Circuit, or Supreme — there are again ten or twenty thousand settled finally in some lesser court of trial:  a small claims court, a municipal court, the court of a magistrate or justice of the peace.  Here in this moving mountain of the cases unappealed, is the impact of the officials on society — even within the realm of litigation.  Beyond, there is the massive impact of the administrative machine.   By my own showing, on my own premises, these are what count.  I pass them by.  Out of my own mouth, damned.

Yet what can I do?  I am a prey, as is every man who tries to work with law, to the apperceptive mass.  I see best what I have learned to see.  I am a prey, too — as are the others — to the old truth that the available limits vision, the available bulks as if it were the whole.  What records have I of the work of magistrates?  How shall I get them?  Are there any?  And if there are, must I search them out myself?  But the appellate courts make access to their work convenient.  They issue reports, printed, bound, to be had all gathered for me in the libraries.  The convenient  source of information lures.  Men work with it, first, because it is there; and because they have worked with it, men build it into ideology.  The ideology grows and spreads and gains acceptance, acquires a force and an existence of its own, becomes a thing to conjure with:  the rules and concepts of the courts of last resort.   And there is more to the matter than this.  It does remain true that if a case is appealed, it is the appellate court whose word is the last word, the word that counts.  We cannot then neglect it.  In large matters (which will pay appeal) we can and must work with the high court in the forefront of our minds.  Even in small matters, we have seen that the rules of appellate courts are good to press upon the lower, that the lower court attempts to give heed to them, that with them we may bring the lower court to see our way.  There is excuse, then, there is reason, for fixing attention on these upper courts.  But is that either reason or excuse for stopping with them.

What warrant have we for assuming that even the judicial system alone (I say nothing of the administrative) works with any unity?  We look at our highest courts and find their words a long way from their doing.  In their own work we find that we can trust their rules part way, but part way only.  In their own work the drive-belt slips between rules and results.  Must we not then assume a further slipping as the distance grows, and as we move down the line?  At each stage less exalted judges, at each stage more of them:  are we not to guess that the average of ability is lower too?  Are we not to guess that other factors join in giving the wheels their drive, as the factor of high court rules slips more and more into ineffectiveness; that the interplay of belt and gearing turns the machine in strange, unsuspected ways?  Ignorance, prejudice, accidents of experience, favor, indolence, even corruption:  how much, how often, when, and where?  How far, too, does the set-up of the procedural system stand between the rules and the results?  Yet by their fruits shall ye know them.   Law is, to the community, what law does.   What picture of the doing can you find in all this study of appellate courts alone?

Again, as so often, I have no remedy.  One thing of great importance we can offer:  the wherewithal to discover the official version of the rules, and some experience in observing how the highest of officials work with them.   Some practice, too, and some information, as to what they mean to laymen whose affairs are big enough to call for taking thought as to these officials.  We can, too, call attention, now and again, to the limitations of the picture thus set up.  But we cannot keep the picture from distortion, as you go more and more deeply into a single part of it, neglecting all the others.  We cannot take you into the other parts.  We have neither the wit nor the knowledge — neither we, nor any man.  A first beginning has been made, is being made, at getting the necessary knowledge.  No more:  a first beginning.  We have achieved in this the first stage on the road to wisdom:  some few of us have begun to guess how limited the knowledge of any of us is.  For you, meanwhile, the task of setting yourselves so far as in you lies to question always, as you go, what lies beyond; to whom does this rule mean anything at all?  And how much, even to that man, does it mean?