 Y cwmfrânwyr y Ffartel, y Gweithdoedd a'r Gweithdoedd y Lleidio Lleidio, Pan gen i'n gweld Duncan a i'w'r Ffartel.ци nhw'n ffartyr! Rwy'n cais i ddim yn Thrones gyda mynd i chi fwy. Rwy'n cais ei fydd yn gallu felly ddim yn gweithio Duncan, os beth sy'n fwy ar ôl yn gweithio. Mae ydi'r sgwm hyn yn ei gwybod cyn amwneud Yn y ffordd, mae'n gwybod y penderfyniad i'w ffordd yn mynd i'w ffordd, yn y lleol yn y bwysig iawn, dweud o'r cyflwyniad, ac yn y penderfyniad, i bryd yn ymddangos, yn y ffordd yma, rydych chi'n ffordd o wahanol, gan unrhyw hwnnw, gwahanol eich gwahanol. A'r clywbeth y tario'r ddim yn ymddangos i'w rhai o'r orientau A'r cyfnodd o'r mawr, ond, y ffwrdd yn ymwneud yn ymdyn nhw'n argymell A'r clywbeth yw ymdyn nhw'n ymdyn nhw'n ymdyn nhw. Ond rwy'n gweithio nid o'r dyfans o'r hyn sydd ymddangos i gael, ond, ond rwy'n gweithio ymgylch yn ymddangos i'r cyffredin a'r unrhyw ffondol o'r llwyslach o'r llwyddochol yng Ngheilio Gweithgwyr o'r Arddur, Havad, Oxford. Rydyn ni oed yn rhoi gweithio i gynnwys ymlaen o'r ysgrifennu, ac rydyn ni wedi bod yn gallu gwneud o'r llwyddochol yma. A byddwn ni'n rhan o'n ei wneud o'r prosfesau fel yma ydych chi'n bwysig. Mae'n cael ei ei gweithio i'r llwyddochol yma, a chi'n gwneud o'r llwyddochol yma i'r llwyddochol Cwysig yw'r rhaid, yn ymgyrch yn gwasanaeth y byddech chi, ond wedi bod yn dangos, Echel-Ei Hart wedi gweld i'n'r ddweud, a wedi wneud am eu bod yn eich hyn. Duncan wedi'u gwneud yn gychwyn, yn ymweld i'r ysgrifau ymlaen, yw'r hyn o'r cyllid mewn gwirionedd yn ymddangos, yn ymgyrch yn ei gwasanaeth. THAT THOUGHT that maybe his tenure committee was more rigorous than in Oxford. Interestingly what these texts have in common is that they are a critique of leftist orthodoxy ideas from the left. So my book is the critique of Marxism and Rubbishing Pasciw Llanes and so on. Dwi'n meddwl cyddiad o'r cyllidio llwyr cyllidiaeth lleol, ychydig yn ddechrau'r llyfr yng nghydlenio. Mae'r llyfr yn dda i'r llyfr, mae'r llyfr yn ddod yn anghydd, yn Llyfr Llyfr, ac mae'r llyfr yn ddod yn ddod yn ddod yn ddod. Dw i'n meddwl, yna rydyn nhw'n meddwl o'r barod, a ddim yn edrych i'ch meddwl rhywbeth yn yng Nghyrch, ac mae hynny'n gwneud yn ynddo i'r byddol. Ond yn ymweld i'r grwg, gan y cyfnod y Llywodraeth Cymru, y Llywodraeth Llywodraeth, yw ei ddod yn ysgrifennu'r ysgol. Mae'n fyddech chi'n gweithio'r gwybod yw'r bydau allan o'r cyflasio'r law, sy'n gweithio'r ymdigoedd o Oxford. Mae'n gweithio i gael i chi yn rhan o'i llwyso'r llyfr ymdigoedd, o'r law yw'r llyfr yn gweithio'r llyfr, ac mae gynhyrch arno'r gyfer ddechrau, o bobl yn ddim yn unig, Mae'r ffordd yn ddim yn ganwethaf, i'r ffordd mewn ddweud, fyddai'n bwyd i'r rhaglan. Mae'r oeddwn i'r ddweud o ddweud o Dungan, o'i ddweud ei waspwysau ac oedol, oherwydd, ac mae'r ddiwylliant yma, mae'n gilydd, a'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r ddweud o hyd yn gweld y ddweud, gweld archwPU that there's a deep structure of capitalism that law fits into this and he was rubbishing this in every possible way. He made some tiny concession that, maybe there has to be private property in a capitalist society because of the tragedy of the commons but that was, as far as he went He was regretting legal reasoning as functioning it seemed to me almost completely autonomously full of byddwch yn cyfgledd ar gwaith cyfnodol, ond yn cael ei fod yn gwneud hynny'n cyfnodol. Felly mae'n rhan i'r ffordd ac... ..ac ble mae'n gael i ddim yn gweithio'r gair o gweithio'r gweithio, yn y gwaith o'r gweithio. Ond oedd yn meddwl yr unig ydym yn eu cyfrifiadau felly fe yna'r idea o'r Llyfrgelliaid Eurpoedd, o'r Llyfrgelliaid Eurpoedd, lle mae Duncan o'r tynnu cyd-dweithio, oherwydd y Prifygrws Gyrmys Defnyddio a Llyfrgell i'r dynu o'r ceisio. Rwy'n rhaid i'r cwmhreithio. Rwy'n rhaid i'r cwmhreithio o'r dynnu o'r rheifftyr o'r Fflorum a'r ddyn nhoc oed yn y ddaeth y drosbwyll yn dweud yn y gallwn meddwl. Felly, o'r ddyn nhoc oed, rydyn nhw'n ddim ymddangos y ddiddordeb sy'n ffordd. Felly, mae'r ddiddordeb yn llygwyr mewn cyfnod o'r ddiddordeb sy'n ddiddordeb. Mae'r ddiddordeb yn y ddiddordeb sy'n ddiddordeb sy'n ddiddordeb sy'n ddiddordeb sy'n ddiddordeb. A dyna'r ddiddordeb sy'n ddiddordeb sydd wedi bod y ddiddordeb yma'r wych. Ac ydw i wneud i ddweithio ond. A ond iawn oedd y baeth gyrd rereifos, a os g yn llwythrifreiddio ar y cyfle, ac all y stylo iawn iawn, yn gofyn am y dweud i gyd y teimlo unig yma sydd wedi gwneud wrth fy moddfa. Ac yma'r tynnu yn gilydd, ti'n meddwl am dri iswyddo i ddim yn llwy ymlaen. I thought with no obvious effect. Going back to our different intellectual journey, I'm going right back to the beginning here where we parted company, if you like. About the time I published my first article, which had what seemed to me a splendid title, Capitalist, Discipline and Corporatist Law, Duncan published an article, y cyfrifio cyfrifio y Blackstone cyflwyno, yr wych yn mynd i fydde'ch ymdweud, oedd y gallu'n ddysgu. O... o... O... o... Ac rydw i'n mynd i ddigonio. Wel, dwi'n mynd i'n mynd i'r grawb sydd yw y Blackstone. Rwy'r ystod, rydw i'n ddod i'r statu yn unrhyw ffordd o gyllidol. Rydw i'n rhoi'r ond, mae'r byd i'r ardal yn gweithio'r cyfrifio a'r cyfrifio'r cyfrifio i'r dyfrifio gyda'r law. Y Blackstone was undoubtedly a smart guy. He was always short of money and he published those commentaries which you perhaps the only person alive has ever read. But the reason he did it was to make money and this increased his annual income eight-fold. Great textbook, yes. Blackstone succeeded in indeed imposing a structure but this structure was of historical interest certainly but the question in my mind as I approached your article was how an analysis of that structure of the common law in 18th century England by some arch-tory. No matter how, no matter how perceptive your analysis might be, how this was going to contribute even in a tiny way to a leftist political agenda in the 20th century. No doubt that was the wrong question to ask and I missed the point though, it still niggles. But what I did learn enormously and it has influenced my work in a way that my work has never influenced you is to take legal reasoning rather more seriously and think about the concepts and images of relationships which are presented in it and just sort of using some of your phrases thinking about these concepts and images as universal building blocks of modern thought and these building blocks are used to rationalise social and political arrangements just as Blackstone had done and furthermore the work could be promising if it could demonstrate that there were deep flaws in those building blocks and how they joined together that might explain some of the failures of modern legal analysis and the difficulties encountered by anyone minded to criticise those features of modern society and I think it's not possible to attribute that sort of ambition to Duncan's more theoretical work as a search for deep structure of legal thought itself and discourses including antinomies and contradictions but there remains the question of course of whether once you've understood this deep structure of legal thought the fundamental contradiction and so on how this is going to serve leftish political purposes or indeed any political purpose and in the Blackstone commentaries Duncan actually has I think it's a footnote where he says well at this point I'm just going to deconstruct as it were and I'm leaving the sort of the project of changing the world to a bit later you know it's a sort of and so that was all right I could see that that agenda but I think that idea of deferral and preparation for the more sociological structural studies that disappeared after that we all modify our ambitions you'll learn about that and so it really became an analysis of how the law thinks and I think some of that is fabulous just understanding it let me share with you one of my favourites for many years I taught in jurisprudence the distinction between rules and principles there was an orthodox oxford view about this and but what Duncan says about this is he says that you can't tell the difference between rules and principles on their face just by looking at them it depends upon it depends on how comfortable lawyers feel with treating any normal rule or string of words as as an instrument of deductive reasoning and that itself depends upon a particular legal consciousness we heard this this afternoon with I thought rather an elegant presentation by Joanne there's the judge he's doing something that's very strange really it's a complete act of legal formalism here's the right here's the answer and this is a very abstract human right and he has no difficulty in going from that very abstract human right to as it turns out a happy result it doesn't always work out that way we are in the age I think of human rights legal formalism in Europe it's and where people feel very confident in being able to deduct from very abstract rights to very concrete conclusions and I think it's interesting I think I love Duncan's recognition that that requires a particular kind of legal consciousness which has been promoted in our society by a lot of my friends who are human rights activists and that and then that leads on to as soon as you've got this formalism of human rights what happens is you then realise you've got competing rights and then you go to balancing and we have this incredible and it never ceases to amaze me this belief that it's possible through legal reasoning to apply what our test of proportionality where there's a apparently a cost benefit analysis where you weigh up the incrementerables of individual rights and public policy on the other and you produce a determinate outcome so I've learnt a lot from Duncan just this analysis of legal consciousness in particular parts of it and understanding how all this fits together how different parts of legal reasoning provide mutual support and how there's a there is a kind of legal consciousness at any one time was changing I find that very helpful in my own work so although I remain ultimately skeptical about a leftist agenda which just looks at legal reasoning in itself I think we need to go back to reuniting this with a broader theory of social and political change undoubtedly we've learnt a lot along the way it's been a good journey and we now understand so much better the paradoxes inconsistencies and the incoherence of the law which conceals the deep structures of social oppression thank you so much Neema for inviting me for organising this and thank you Duncan though I'm deeply skeptical about the claimed basis for this which I'll come to but what a delight to be here what a day I'm just so sorry I missed the rest of the afternoon and it's a talk about an embarrassment of riches the day it started with Kimberly Crenshaw and his ending with discussing your work Duncan so that's terrific so as you know I've chosen to talk in a very selfish way about my absolute favourite essay of Duncan's the the one on legal education as training for hierarchy and I'm going to talk with a view to both thinking about what that work that that article meant for me personally during my career as a legal academic and also to drawing out from the paper one of the themes which I think is really distinctive very unusual and really important in Duncan's work both among legal academics generally and even among critical legal scholars and that is his concern to engage critically and very very honestly as well as always very amusingly with the tricky position of the left or progressive scholar or lawyer vis-a-vis legal scholarship teaching and practice when confronted with the tension between not merely his or her own ideals and those embedded in legal doctrines methods or professional arrangements but also the tension inherent in exercising the critical technique of exposing the ideological biases lurking below the surface level of neutrality or objectivity of legal judgment or argument while remaining conscious of the vulnerability of one's own position to exactly the same deconstruction now I'm just going to give a little plug to your latest article Duncan coming out in Lawn Critique is that right I know you haven't talked about it in detail today but actually I was delighted when I read it because I found that this willingness of yours to engage with this difficult issue which is always really intrigued me and engage me about your work is and your willingness I must say not only to explore the intellectual dimensions of it but the sort of affective dimensions of it is really very central to this latest paper of yours in which you make a sort of fascinating suggestion that what you call a hermeneutics of suspicion characterizes the competing positions in legal scholarship and sort of amounts to a kind of psychoanalytic projective identification in which we're all projecting our own anxieties about the vulnerability of the objectivity of our own position onto our on to our critics and I'd love to be debating that with you but I'm going to leave it aside in favour of talking about this wonderful 1982 article and I'm just going to preface that by mentioning a few of the other things that I just think are very noteworthy and precious about Duncan's career and Duncan himself a few words of personal appreciation I'm tempted in view of Hugh's Florence story to just preface this with my own personal favourites Duncan alcohol should be Duncan and Nicky alcohol story which illustrates something about Duncan which is his extreme consideration for others I seem to remember we had the pleasure David and I of having you to stay for a night or so many years ago when you were coming to do a talk at Birkbeck because I can't think why we weren't putting why you poor thing had to stay with us and not be putting a decent hotel knowing Birkbeck we'd probably sort of drunk away the departmental funds or something but I remember asking you what you would like like to drink and among the menu of options I put you as a gin and tonic and you said yes you'd like a gin and tonic and then I discovered we hadn't got any tonic at which point so I said it's fine I'll just nick round to the shop and you said no no don't worry about that the gin will do fine I can still remember the I really can still remember the hangover I really care okay so here are four things I want to mention about Duncan before I get the paper first of all his just legendary generosity to doctoral students and young scholars generally I mean I think this is really nicely reflected in that I was talking to someone who's actually here now who was at the conference I was co-hosting at LSE today and who said well I'm very sorry I'm gonna have to leave now because I've really got to go to the the conference at SOAS in honour of Duncan Kennedy and I said oh were you a student of Duncan's and he said no but my supervisor was and that's enough to make me feel as though I I'm feel a great loyalty to Duncan and that's the kind of way in which Duncan's personal commitment to and sort of intellectual engagement with his students just is a gift that's been passed on so widely so thank you. Secondly Duncan has as we all know a really extraordinary ability to combine a prodigious set of skills as a doctrinal lawyer with a really deep interest in the big picture within which those intricacies of legal reasoning at which he's so good at expounding proceed. Indeed his detailed critical practice has proceeded in the light of this sort of broad periodisation that one could call virtually vaebarian in its scope and ambition so while maintaining his interest in the intricacies of how legal arguments are put together and organise their own criteria of persuasiveness or legitimacy he never loses sight of the impact of those broader socio-political forces on the way in which those distinctive forms of legal power operate on whom among legal actors and others they empower or disempower and of course that broad breadth of his work is also informed by a really sort of enviably wide range of reading across the social sciences and humanities. It's hard to find anything that you're not interested in actually Duncan. I think that's one of your great secrets. Thirdly Duncan's consistent interest not only in the history of the common law but also in civilian and other legal traditions a really decisive rejection of the parochialism which unfortunately pervades so much doctrinal legal scholarship. And then last but very definitely not least his capacity to combine a really intensely serious engagement with a pervasive sense of fun as well as of irony and not excluding self-irony. Let's face it Duncan is the genius of the cheeky title my favourites being the article I've chosen to talk about along with the first chapter of sexy dressing itself of course a strong contender I imagine Dan might have had something to say about that. So this chapter was radical intellectuals in American culture and politics or my talk at the Gramsci Institute. Was it serious? I just always makes me smile. So it's hard I wrote here it's hard to think of another male academic well let me just rephrase that it's hard to think of another academic of any you know description at all gender or otherwise however impeccable their progressive credentials who could have got away with publishing a book with that title in 1993 and yet again I I think myself at the secret lay in the seriousness with which you engaged particularly in the last chapter of that book with the issues being raised by feminist scholars and did so in a way that was both had your trademark boldness but I think beneath the boldness I read as being beguilingly self-critical. So that brings me nicely to legal education as training for hierarchy. So this paper was published in my second year as a law teacher but I confess I didn't actually encounter it until 1984 1985 when Hugh and I were involved with a few of our more open-minded Oxford colleagues in a study group in which we were reading some of the key papers emerging from the critical legal studies movement. One colleague by the way when invited to join the group declined on the basis that he didn't attend events for which a party card was necessary. Things in this country very rarely got as polarised as I think they did in in the US but it was sometimes there was a lot of suspicion around though certainly not a hermeneutics of suspicion that would be far too exotic for Oxford in those days. So to use a technical term here I was just blown away by this article because it seemed to me to put its finger on a whole host of sort of painful spots in my own experience of being a law student and a law teacher. The student's experience of having one's knowledge regularly disqualified until one had learnt to tailor it according to the prevailing conventions. The subtle feeling that certain intuitive ways of responding to issues of being sort of educated out of one in a way which implied some kind of moral or emotional loss just as a bit of colour here as an undergraduate my trust's lectures were introduced by the lecturer by the statement that the lectures would be based on two premises that what the Queen in Parliament enacted was law and that the Oxford English Dictionary was always correct. It's true I'll not make it up. So that gave a fairly clear steer on what level of critical engagement was being expected. We were definitely in thinking behind the bicycle shed's terrain there. But more opposite to my then position as I was reading the piece as a young law teacher I also recognise the uncomfortable feeling of sort of bad faith as I struggle to introduce my students to critical ideas for example about the law policy distinction which you talk about in the paper while also trying to ensure that their chances in an exam system over which I had absolutely no control would not be impeded and even a leaving aside that sort of question about exams I felt a deeper discomfort which I think I can best describe by my memories of over many years teaching first year criminal law with generations of students looking at me quizzically I think some of them actually looked quite sorry for me as I carefully introduced reasons to think that the very standards understandings and protocols which they had struggled to learn at the hands of other tutors and textbooks were not all that they seemed and were appropriately subject to some fairly subject searching critique. So to me Duncan's message that the whole edifice of legal reasoning was nonsense was accordingly reassuring but also worrying liberating and also a bit paralyzing. So it was intriguing to reread the piece I mean I spent a lot of the last intervening time working on historical and comparative issues and I did wonder whether I'd think okay it was it was 1982 or it was Harvard Law School and I think it's true to say that in rereading it I was I was probably more struck by the US UK contrast than I was at the time for the simple reason that when I first read it I didn't have any experience of studying or teaching in the US nor did I at that stage as I do now have personal experience of the Harvard Law School gym a space saturated in contradictory unwritten rules and one crying out Duncan for inclusion in any updated deconstruction of Harvard legal education. Notwithstanding the creation of a number of very self-consciously critical and socio-legal departments here nonetheless teaching against the grain is still very very hard. I remember William Twyling saying famously at an early Birkbeck exam board you know for a critical law school you're teaching an awful lot of black letter law but so notwithstanding the differences and some pluralisation of what counts as good legal scholarship at least in the intervening time the paper still seems to me to identify with almost painful accuracy what we might call sort of echoing Hughes title the deep structure of legal education and the dilemmas for the critical law professor who likes to indeed has to for psychological survival believe in his or her own good faith while appreciating both our own limited room for manoeuvre and the tools available to us in effect the deconstruction of our opponent's position as ideological and the implicit representation of our own position as truthful just or undistorted bearing a close family resemblance to those which are the object of our critique I think you call this in the latest paper and I love this phrase the existential delicacy of the jurist situation so thank you Duncan in conclusion because your paper gave me the reassurance that I was far from being alone and a framework with which to discuss the issues with sympathetic colleagues like Hugh it isn't so clear it gave me too many steers on how to emerge the dilemma and I guess what I took away from it and still do is the knowledge with its acknowledgement of the sort of huge pressure on one not to constantly putting up one's hand to uncertainty or perplexity is just that one has to resist and have the courage to do that and say one line isn't sure and be reflexive and honest about this existential delicacy and I think your own capacity to embody and yet transcend the contradictions is manifest in your having perfected over so many years what one might call an exemplary practice indeed aesthetic I would say of engaged resistance and successful confidence raising at the heart of perhaps the sort of quintessentially elite law school of the world and it seems to me that you've done that not only because of your intellectual brilliance but also your generosity your honesty and the self-confidence which has allowed you to be so funny because it does take a lot of confidence to be funny and I'm so grateful that you have been so while expressing deep skepticism deep skepticism about whether Duncan can ever really retire from the fray as opposed to the HLS scene of engagement I salute your stature as the embodiment of a fundamental contradiction on Fonterri and international treasure thank you thank you for such rich and exciting papers it was really hard to keep an eye on the clock um so now Gina will provide us with some comments thanks thanks for rubber um well I'll probably start by saying I feel a bit overwhelmed amazing array of papers and and day I'm going to focus on actually the stories that we tell ourselves perhaps because most of the papers today have been stories um but before I do that thanks of course to Nimmer for organising today and Tara who's been working hard in the background all along as well and thank you to the three panellists that I'm really honoured to be a discusant for today so as I said I want to talk about the stories we tell ourselves um that is not what we do out there but how we create I guess an effective community in here um so I'm going to um outline specific responses to each paper um a question each before a more general question that I guess I guess hope all of us might engage in um so Hugh thank you for your paper and your stories um I was struck by the struck by the way that you did use memory I had the advantage of seeing the papers in advance so um but I was struck by the way you used memory and then of course across today everybody's used memory of stories uh in conjunction with either reading or working with Duncan um a narrative to tell a legal history uh and I and actually talking about stories it's not my own idea a drawing on the wonderful work of Claire Hemings at the LSE and her book Why Stories Matter and in her book she talks about narratives of lost progress and return and it's if you reflect across today in Hugh's paper as well we see these stories of lost progress and return of how that we tell the story of how we got here or what the past and future of critical legal studies might be and what it is or what it ought to be um so my question here is about linking and thinking about storytelling's narratives highlighting lost progress and return as actually putting a role for affect in what we do and of course the last panel talked about maybe avoided talking about emotion uh although Duncan did pick up on this and talked about passions as well and I feel not just in the words but also in the way the papers especially on this panel but across the day have elicited a certain amount of passion in the way they're represented is about narrative and affect um so Hugh my question is how do we engage and understand the deep structures of law and both embrace and yet understand the way that we use affect because it strikes me that we draw colleagues readers methods towards us in a way to produce an account of law and I just wonder if you might play with both the tensions and the possibilities of that and the consciousness of what we're doing um and for me that links in nicely to Nikki's paper thank you Nikki um I've written in my notes pull out effective dimension critical techniques vulnerabilities willingness exposing bias uh worrying liberating intriguing so all words that again seem to me to connect back something in the method something in the telling something in the narrative that that used affect um and of course uh connected then I think nicely not just about our research but that our investment as teachers as well um so how do we as teachers and writers account for and respond to our effective techniques we convince as you were saying law students or we draw them in um and I guess it was really nice in your paper how you connect that to Duncan's ideas around uh projective identification or perhaps uh at that point when affect it also meets desire um and so I wanted to ask you about that uh I guess my question is do we need to emerge from this dilemma or do we need to gain more skills perhaps just in naming it and seeing it so rather than a method of what do we how do we apply these techniques to look at law or out there can we use these techniques to look at ourselves and how we create a community um and if we talk about desire then I guess there's a turn to psycho analysis at that point um which raises some questions about masculine closure that I think are perhaps embedded in the projective identification that I would have interested in your thoughts um so the masculine subject and I obviously don't mean men but the masculine subject of psycho analysis that pursues competition separation severance over connection and affect so I wonder if you could bring some of those themes out of your work and Roy thank you because I'd seen the first two papers and I was thinking about affect and then your paper which gave us hope faith style narrative personal political the worm of nothingness despair critique passions perspectives resistance um and the politics of organising your own people which thank you um it seemed really important stories that you told us today uh and your personal story embodied precisely my questions about the first two papers how do we use effective dimensions as theorists um but perhaps also how do effective dimensions also emerge in our curriculum um as teachers which I think is perhaps what you're describing as an attempt to achieve and transform in at Tel Aviv Law School and how do these effective dimensions create tell or appear in the stories that we tell about our methods and that's and I so so this is a room of critical race critical legal feminist scholars postcolonial scholars um and how do we embrace deny this isn't just for you this is for everyone deny distance inter internalised reject the the deep structures of critical legal scholars how do we and this I think the projective the projective identification is a is a distory of avoidance of that looking at that effective community that we create perhaps so they're my specific questions I'm sorry that I don't think they're very easy or probably got any answers but I wonder if we could reflect on them and then I have one more question which I'd really like to open out to the floor especially to my students who see here but also colleagues I guess and ask a question about why so us or or how so us and maybe Nimor wants to pick up this point as well can or does the work of critical legal scholars have relevance for the work of this law school what type of projective identification occurs when we deploy methods built into our response to European and US legal models how does that matter at so as if they're the tools that we use in our study of Asia Africa and the Middle East it's not a negative question but I do think we have to ask it and and talk about that here in this specific law school what projective identification occurs when when we do that thank you thank you thanks Gina so I'll let the speakers respond and maybe then Duncan would want to that's called emotion so irrepressible hope that things are going to get better a lot of my leftist friends are you know they're your characters you know they say it's always just getting worse and there's a new structure which is going to make things you know international financial capitalism is going to ruin us all and then poverty issues and so on but I don't have that and I don't think Duncan does you have an order to spread on a hope and think that in little ways workplace or whatever it's possible sometimes to resist sometimes to make changes and sometimes to be a leader and just say this is where I think we want to go you may be lucky a lot of the rest of the faculty may follow with you I think I think that's important to keep hope and I said you always have that the other thing is I think any good friends to sustain this because you heard me here I used to share our angst over a glass of wine once a week sometimes more sometimes more and there were many difficult issues we were coping with the hierarchies the fact that the legal academy was almost exclusively bail in those days and that meant for women working there particularly but for us all I think I think that that local community and it being an effective community in the sense you are sharing issues and problems that are helping to support each other that's always been an important part of my experience to have a group of good friends who I could share my problems with in some sort of confessional sometimes so today yes I was telling stories today and but that was partly I think the occasion I'm not sure I do stories so often but it's important to understand that that is one of the the deep structures legal consciousness of common lawyers we love stories we tell the facts of the case what happened in a way that our friends to cross the channel uh they they don't they talk abstract concepts which they're going to use through deductive reasoning to apply that's part of our legal consciousness and once one's aware of that that narrative style one has to know just have to use it to tell the story slightly differently and to do the what we used to call the deviationist doctrine to explain these in a slightly different way from the popular orthodox fear so stories are are is it exciting and so you need to think about how to tell good better stories about the law to a thing thank you well thank you very much your comments Gina and um I think my to to go straight to your question and I'd like to sort of build on some other things Hugh's just said um do we need to emerge from this dilemma you ask or is it just a question of being more reflexive about it and I think I don't think there is I'm sorry if I made it sound a bit like some hegellian is going to be this and that and then there will be this nice resolution I don't think there is a a a neat exit but um I think being reflexive about it is is at least a step but to to proceed on the theme of the affective and the narrative um you know I very much agree with Hugh that you know friendship is a huge part of how we can be effective as teachers and as people who survive with different views from those of the mainstream and our professional story um and um I think that that I'm I'm I'm very bad at hope I'll I'll am I one of the eels Hugh I'm sure I have been occasionally over especially in the deepest darkest male-est oxford days I think I probably was a female version of the ear of course she said hastily um but I but I suppose here's another dilemma for me um I suppose I'm I think I don't have much difficulty with the sort of bringing the affective into my work and I think that the way I teach a way I have always taught is through affect very largely and through building some kind of relationship with my students and I think that's been uh that carries its own dilemmas because um the truth is that uh much as we all identify with the deconstruction of the hierarchy of legal education there is a sort of inevitable you know is that there's no point in pretending that it's a completely equal or non-differentiated relationship um and setting that up in a way that produces sufficient confidence on the part of uh students while being while as it were putting oneself in a vulnerable position which I feel one one should in order to communicate communicate properly and learn is actually quite a quite a trick and I don't think I've always done it successfully by any manner of means but I do think on the the sort of broader friendship front I think we've been incredibly lucky those of us on the legal left in this period partly on the back of the work of people like Duncan and Kim and the people who were there early and people in earlier generations who were doing other kinds of against-the-grain work because for all that I'm a bit of aneol most of my career I have actually felt as I've been part of a set of effective groups of sisterhoods with the feminist legal studies community with with critical legal studies and it's really kept me going because I don't think I would have stayed in a law school without that to be honest I've always been a pretty reluctant lawyer um and I you know I wouldn't have made it I just wouldn't have made it so I'm very grateful so a word about the effective dimension in organizing um I don't have anything very clever to say about this it's uh except that it's absolutely crucial at least as far as as relatively small groups are concerned I mean it's almost everything as far as relatively small groups are concerned and I think that the there's a danger and I think it uh happens to a lot of us while we're while we're doing our while we're doing our dissertations when we're so deep into the books that we forget that there are other people um there's a danger to to forget that especially when we're uh when we're very young and if we don't have uh thriving enough communities around us but once you are actually part of you know if you're lucky you're already part of a community while you're a graduate student and uh and then you know but when you uh when you get to a faculty if it's not working as a community um um there's there's nothing but the effective dimension that is going to change that in a sense because the a reasoned argument about why people should behave in a community oriented fashion is you know it's fine but it's like saying you know we should generate the ideal speech situation and blah blah blah and it's like yeah right great we all agree um so so it's the it's the most important thing but there's no I mean and maybe somewhere out there somewhere people are actually teaching the skill or you can get better at it I have no idea uh my experience of it is that it's mostly a question of luck and a question of putting in time into your relationships the way you would put in time to your books uh they're not you know we all know this about about friendship and sometimes we don't know it in advance that that it uh that it includes the workplace or relationships with students but putting in that kind of time is it's part of it's part of making life it's not some uh it's not some it's not an addition it's it's part of the core thank you so I'll collect a couple of questions and then divert back either to the panelists or then address the question that Gina put on the table for the SOAS law community so Brenna do you want to no absolutely at the end so he can put it all together yeah okay um thanks very much for all of those papers and Gina also for her comments and I wanted to um just make two quick points and then and pose a question about the narrative form to Duncan and oh I was going to say Kimberly but she's leaving the room um the first point is that I think I wanted to just say I think it's really important to complicate um this question around intellectual traditions when we talk about American ones and European ones versus other ones because um I think sometimes in making those distinctions there is a certain kind of erasure that's going on which I feel sort of troubling one is that you know when we talk about American intellectual traditions are we thinking about that um minus um black radical traditions or when we talk about British intellectual you know bodies of work are we thinking about that um you know minus uh black British cultural studies and so you know that that's one kind of pointer or indeed if we think about North American intellectual traditions are we thinking about that minus critical indigenous scholarship right so you know what does the west versus the rest really mean when we think about that and the second point is when we think about European philosophy I think it's also important to remember all of the work that's been done to show how race which is always a gendered concept you know and colonial histories are ever present within the canon of continental philosophy so I just wanted to mention that because I think um we we really need to bear those points in mind when we have this conversation about which philosophies and which traditions were were using um the question I had about narrative form is sort of related to this and I wanted to ask Duncan or anyone else for that matter to reflect on the use of narrative form in Duncan's work and its relationship to critical race theory because when I think about narrative form as a mode of legal reasoning I think of critical race theory which was really you know the body of work which you know pioneered it as a way of doing law and you know in Duncan's earlier work he I think um in one essay sort of talks about how critical race theory is some of the most exciting novel you know uh legal scholarship that's being produced in the US context um so I just I think it's very important I found it interesting that the whole conversation about narrative form took place without a mention of critical race theory and so maybe it's my North American origins that you know sort of my um I feel reactive to that but in any case those are the points I wanted to make thanks thanks Brenna Virginia um thanks Virginia Montuval UCL um I enjoyed all the presentations enormously but I think there's a question that needs to be asked to all the speakers and the earlier speakers I think I have missed the definition of what is the legal left I think many of us here some of us here may disagree on what it is um so I wondered so I understand that it has to do with the criticism of formalism in law you know so this is certainly something that we all here perhaps dislike but then so and Duncan earlier spoke about methodology so it's so um legal left for Duncan is a lot of things one of which is particular methodology to to use and criticize the law but I wonder personally whether it's also about substantive values and what are these substantive values and we haven't spoken very explicitly at least I mean they are implied in all the presentations Hugh said that human rights are nice and he likes the activists that work on these issues but um but that here we need a more general political theory and I like that so but I so I wonder what are these values that bring the legal left together if there is such a thing um yeah please introduce us um just a quick question bringing back to affect and to make you more uncomfortable um it's oh yeah um most of you guys when the affect idea came up you just talked about your own relationships within academia um just to bring it back how about the work or the role of affect in your scholarship or in the way that you try to relate into your wider political projects if you can reflect on that perfect any other questions um so would you like to briefly respond and then Duncan can can speak to any of the themes that we addressed to you yeah yeah would you in your view maybe I could say just one thing about the role of affect in um in writing and what you choose to I mean I'm a firm believer in the fact that we all work on something that has some kind of uh psychological complexity for us so I leave I leave you to ponder the fact that I work on responsibility but I guess that I was struck when I worked on a biography um and revealed a lot about the affective life of the the person I was writing about the man I was writing about that some um some readers understood that to be in some way diminishing of his intellectual stature which which is um an idea I both find ludicrous but also one that is really actually important to counter um so I I think that um certainly that that's been a very important thing for me thinking about that that audience side of it so thanks thanks for raising it the other questions are really good questions as well they're very hard ones so I'm going to lead them to the other panelists and to Duncan yes I can continue it deserves an answer and almost certainly it should come from me it should come from the conference organisers who chose that yes we haven't we haven't spoken a great deal about values and uh that that's a very good observation and I think um and maybe that's been a mission but I I think that um we're kind of focusing on Duncan's contribution and and we and I think his contribution as a word as an answer to that question is that uh it's all much more complicated than you think and the um and that if you say well as you would uh get a few more rights so jolly good thing I can be uh and I won't disagree uh with your that but then but then the sort of argument but then the sort of argument you might produce to say yes but human rights is good but it it closes down other other values and sort of the rights come from the fore and they have great exclusionary force in legal reasoning very often and we begin to forget about other issues that need to be considered like distributive issues on our on our wealth and that's sort of the focus of dignity and property and things like that so these other values get somehow largely what's been suppressed so it's true we haven't talked explicitly about values in terms of that sort of stake but um I think uh this is an occasion where we are thinking the last of uh alertings to the pitfalls of talking about values in any city. Do you want to respond or? I have a very primitive idea about what what the legal left is which is just that there are lots and lots of political conflict and and policy conflict and on any number of them um when when that argument is going on there's there's a left and a right and it's pretty easy to identify um and so I don't have a big stake in trying to say here's the total position of the left it's these 14 propositions um it's but in the in the given arguments it's uh I I don't find it difficult to to figure out what the uh and I want to say what my place is in them uh that doesn't that doesn't mean that there aren't that it isn't worthwhile at some points to figure out uh what the border is between some kind of reformism that's too soft and that you know all all the questions of the implications of your position take human rights for instance right it's good for us to talk about to the extent to which human rights discourse and human rights activism uh actually meshes with a lot of neoliberalism right with uh you know basic opposition to state programs that are geared towards structurally changing uh questions of poverty for instance so those are good discussions to have at times uh and and I think that the there's so much work to be done in just articulating positions within given conflict that a totalizing theory of where the where the border is between left and what isn't left seems to me less less productive and when when all that work is done maybe maybe figuring out where the border lies will will for me become more interesting no I think we can yeah maybe you can address the questions post to you and then we can okay go back to this last question so I guess the question addressed to me was about critical race theory and narrative and maybe affect so uh I think that it was a mistake to think that critical race theory had invented a new form of legal scholarship that was based on narrative I don't think it was a good way for critical race theorists to formulate their program so they were writing incredible articles one after the other on a wide range of different issues of race and obviously this was a situation um and it still is in which critical race theory is a very interesting actual small movement among um black uh left intellectuals with some allies in other minority communities um and my view of my relationship to them was that I was a white guy organizing white guys and organize your own community in part meant don't think that you're going to organize black people in legal academia the question is can we ally with them in which of the basis of alliance speak and there was no reason to think that they were there was nothing sort of sanctified about the way they did it anymore than there was anything sanctified about the way we did it but it was really hot and fantastically interesting to work with critical race theory in its emergence um I always thought that the idea of narrative is a kind of powerful alternative to the white male doctrinal position was a mistake I thought it was a mistake because it was just reifying and exaggerating a version of black identity against white identity which was completely playing into a very older idea about how the how they should construct the public image of their position so we're into narrative that means that we are not formalists that means that we are more into affect that means that we reject rigid binaries of logical reasoning and recognize all these other dimensions of it but as a matter of fact the best critical race theory work was just as doctrinally intense and just as conceptually oriented easily as anything that was being done by the white boy mainstream so that choice was I thought partly defensive that is they were being attacked really hard and the assertion of something unique about their procedure played a tactical role in their defense which I regarded as not a great idea having said that that's about the way a dissenting new oppositional movement that's trying to create momentum in the academy protect their ability to institutionalize because there's the threat is always that you're going to get fired or marginalized as you begin to organize in an oppositional way so but that was their decision so it's a very complicated strategic decision and it worked pretty well pretty well a separate question is the narrative affect idea so there are there I really do I'm interested in a way that I think is unusual but I don't see why more people aren't interested in it in trying to get into doctrinal or historical writing a thread which is both a narrative thread and a deliberately attempt to raise the pulse or lower the pulse to get the reader's affects flowing and I try to write that way as a very specific aesthetic agenda and Roy read some examples of sloganeering that were designed to so teaching from the left my anecdotage that that's an idea to get some moment of emotion from the reader before we even begin and I think that that's really a good thing to do and I think a lot of critical race theory writing does it too we're not talking about narrative as a new form of legal scholarship but just as an incredibly important technique which I really believe in now Nikki mentioned her biography the thing about her biography that's amazing is both it is an example of a biography which is both intensely conscious of the emotional private emotional life of HLA heart but also the narrative itself is very strongly evocative of emotion in the reader because she manages to get at the way his life is in some way exemplary for other people reading about it that's to evoke the affect you don't have to use an affect word you don't have to say passion you don't have to say rage the basic idea is that you construct the narrative so that it grips the reader because the reader thinks oh shit you know wow ouch and in some mode of identification so I don't I think that I just think it would be good if more relatively highly structured doctrinal scholarship tried to deploy those techniques but as and as Roy said so Roy puts it all I completely agree with what Roy said about the incredible significance of personal relationships in movement building I think it's over and over again underestimated how much of movement change and evolution is the random consequence of the capacities of leaders who just emerge to establish that one-on-one contact that then can be built into some kind of collective thing and I think it's deeply deeply about friendship and love as a matter of fact and very complicated emotionally because it's also about resentment and envy and jealousy and anger within any attempt to create a serious network of people who are going to act together so that I think that's true but I don't I really think that it's also perfectly plausible that the most striking legal writers great legal writers of the past and I think in the American context Oliver Wendell Holmes is a very striking example their rhetoric is designed to get your pulse racing it's completely objective but the idea is some twist or some contradiction or some side comment throw away comment gives away the game that there's a lot at stake and I don't see why we should not collectively write more that way I think it would be great if we did I guess we're getting to the end so maybe I can make a very general comment I I don't want myself at this point to give three comments on the three amazing papers but maybe but I guess what I'd like to say is this so this has been an amazing experience for me as the legal the past of the legal left oh wait a minute I've got to say something more about the legal left I there are my approaches more like like Royce I don't have in general I the problem is not to figure out for me whatever side I'm on that's the legal left so my first question is what side am I on and that might be fairly difficult to resolve in a particular case but once that's resolved it answers the larger question I've spent no time in my life wondering about what the legal left is on that theory and I've then the question is who agrees and then at that point there's some people who agree that we're on the side and therefore the legal left and then we can really strangle each other but only at that point so that's the point where we begin to do that so that's my answer to that question let me just say that this is the whole thing this is addressed in Nimmer so Nimmer was my student he's a student with whom I've worked very closely and I feel quite identified with him but this is an incredible gift Nimmer an amazing organizing thing all the six presentations and the two comments were wonderful and they do sort of I feel somewhat overwhelmed by the intensity of the niceness and the praise so it's actually somewhat difficult to deal with it's very very very makes me incredibly happy this has just made me ecstatically euphoric euphoric line without any substance of any kind so I mean controlled substances or and and uh just I just want to thank you I mean you were so nice to me you alone and Rahaf managed to preserve a little bit of very healthy distance but barely so I just wish for all of you that you might have in your life an experience like this it's really really fulfilling and Nimmer thank you very much I mean Custis said correctly that the gift problem is is a problem the gift is a problem I just hope that in some other future thing I can give back some of the good feeling that I've gotten out of this whole thing so thank you a million times so thank you so much it's only a vote of thanks thank you for this panel for for all the panels mostly thank you Duncan for coming here skipping another day in Paris to come to London it has been a pleasure and an honor to host you here and think about and reread your articles and again and again and hopefully this is just the beginning of a conversation obviously the question of what is the legal left is it's anonymous with Duncan or not and the past and the future it's only a beginning of a conversation this is was not meant to be a conclusive conversation it's only one way of having this conversation and hopefully we'll have more and more of these from different aspects and angles and that was only the modest goal of this event I would like to thank Tara the wonderful organizer of this conference without you nothing would have been possible I would like to thank the volunteers Sia and the other PhDs I would like to thank those of you who traveled from far away to come here I would like to thank finally the head of school Paul Kohler for supporting and making this event for this event and making it possible so thank you so much and thank you also for bearing with us all this time you have been a wonderful audience and hopefully we'll see you in future events have a good night