K
by Alex
Why do I think that law, as a topic, is a pale, pastel pink?
It was when I was at Chicago, taking a course at the law school, that I had this sudden realization that some of the most brilliant thinkers of all time were lawyers. I don’t know why this seemed like a surprise to me. It is not as if — let me put it this way — I thought that anthropologists has cornered the market. I had not thought too much about what lawyers and judges do, but I had thought of about philosophy and I suppose I just sort of figured that that was what all the mind-bendingly brilliant people would occupy themselves with since, in the real world, you cannot start a special private school to train young mutants to use their powers for good. But of course speculation about what it means to follow a rule, or what ‘property’ actually means, or how passing a law does or does not actually change behavior are all questions for legal thinkers. And, of course, all those folks in the Gs and Hs who long for ‘application’ and ‘relevance’ should realize that actually sending to people to prison (or not) and giving them an easement (or not) is application in a very direct sense — no wonder so many smart people do it.
K is an unusual letter for me since it houses many scholarly books which happen to be about law, including a good number of journals such as the Melanesian Law Review, whose early numbers are a hoot (why shouldn’t cannibalism be legal in Papua New Guinea now that we’ve chased the Australian colonizers out in the name of our national culture?) But it is also the letter which houses an absolutely tremendous amount of actual legislation, instructions and regulations, and other professional stuff which is pretty much useless to me. And then there is the tremendous amount of stuff in between which poses a particular problem. I am sure you have had a run-in with this kind of work in your own field: volume after volume that seems really really relevant but which, when you crack it open, some how manages to be totally not relevant and often times doesn’t seem to say anything at all. How does that happen? At first I always feel relieved, but then I know that the real gems are the ones hidden beneath a lot of overburden and I feel like I have to search through all of them just to make sure the one that got away doesn’t get away.
D’Angelo, the law library at Chicago, was a trip. It is not just the library, it is also the faculty offices. Around the edge of the stacks are the professors offices. This fact, as well as my obvious complete and utter alienness when compared to the well-groomed lawyers-to-be who knew where all the books were and what the wireless password was and actually owned laptops instead of an aging Centris 650 yes that’s right that’s how old school I am a Centris 650 dude — all of these facts made me feel pretty out of place in the law library. But at the same time I also felt a certain placed-ness, as if certain volumes had long ago been hidden in the law library so that one day I might discover them. Who else was looking for those rare English translation of Gierke and Jhering? Did any of these tort-obsessed folks really care about Drucila Cornell’s edited anthology on violence and the law that featured both Walter Benjamin and Derrida’s essays on the force of law. So that helped.
At Manoa I visit the law library because of their excellent collection of works on indigenous people and the law, and especially Hawaii. Best of all, books are almost never checked out. It is not that law students don’t read at UH Manoa, but they seem to use the law school more as a study space, and to hit the noncirculating reference material. Or maybe I’m the only one interested in the copies of titles like The Long Interview by Grant McCracken or Kinship and The Unexpected by Strathern which are, for some reason, stored there. Also, and I don’t really know why this is, every time I go in there there is someone using the computer to order prayers from churches — apparently this is something you can do — or reading inspirational literature, blessingoftheday.com, and so forth. Why I am not sure. I think it is people who are not actually in the law school who use the public terminals. Also I like that the circulation desk uses the old, relatively uncomputerized way of checking out books. They are kicking it old school over at the law library.