Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations
The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale’s past and with the social climate in which they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the future of American legal education.

Inspired by Yale’s legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school’s academic focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties, helping to make Yale’s current celebrity possible.
1118727470
Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations
The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale’s past and with the social climate in which they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the future of American legal education.

Inspired by Yale’s legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school’s academic focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties, helping to make Yale’s current celebrity possible.
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Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations

Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations

by Laura Kalman
Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations

Yale Law School and the Sixties: Revolt and Reverberations

by Laura Kalman

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Overview

The development of the modern Yale Law School is deeply intertwined with the story of a group of students in the 1960s who worked to unlock democratic visions of law and social change that they associated with Yale’s past and with the social climate in which they lived. During a charged moment in the history of the United States, activists challenged senior professors, and the resulting clash pitted young against old in a very human story. By demanding changes in admissions, curriculum, grading, and law practice, Laura Kalman argues, these students transformed Yale Law School and the future of American legal education.

Inspired by Yale’s legal realists of the 1930s, Yale law students between 1967 and 1970 spawned a movement that celebrated participatory democracy, black power, feminism, and the counterculture. After these students left, the repercussions hobbled the school for years. Senior law professors decided against retaining six junior scholars who had witnessed their conflict with the students in the early 1970s, shifted the school’s academic focus from sociology to economics, and steered clear of critical legal studies. Ironically, explains Kalman, students of the 1960s helped to create a culture of timidity until an imaginative dean in the 1980s tapped into and domesticated the spirit of the sixties, helping to make Yale’s current celebrity possible.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807876886
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 05/18/2006
Series: Studies in Legal History
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 488
File size: 4 MB

About the Author

Laura Kalman is professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is author of three books, including Legal Realism at Yale, 1927–1960; The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism; and Abe Fortas: A Biography.

Table of Contents


Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

1 Setting the Stage: Law Schools and the Sixties

2 The Yale Law School on the Eve of the Sixties

3 The Sixties Come to Yale

4 Student Power

5 Alumni Weekend, 1969

6 Trials and Tribulations

7 Bringing Us Together Again

8 After the Fire

9 The Most Theoretical and Academically Oriented Law School in America

10 Epilogue

Afterword

Notes

Index

Illustrations

"Students Provide Welcome for Alumni"

Charles E. Clark

Sterling Law Buildings under construction

Sterling Law Buildings today

"Another Color on the Campus"

Eugene V. Rostow

Alexander M. Bickel

Louis Pollak

Kingman Brewster

Abraham Goldstein

Duncan Kennedy

Yale law faculty in the late 1960s

Front page of the first issue of the Yale Advocate, December 11, 1967

Law students and faculty protest the war

Richard Balzer

Ann Hill

"The Inner Logic of Grades"

Scenes from Alumni Weekend, 1968

J. Otis Cochran

"Negotiating Committee Asks Joint Student-Faculty Rule"

Jonathan Krown

Hog Farmers at Yale

Hog Farmers' bus

Dedication page, "Women Lawyers' Centennial, 1869-1969, No Progress"

S.H.I.T.F.A.C.E. posters

"Create Two, Three … Many Yale Law Struggles"

Walt Wagoner

Charles Reich

Women picketing Mory's

"Kidnapped": Bobby Seale

Meeting at Yale, ca. 1970

Surveying books saved from the fire

May Day rally on New Haven Green, 1970

Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton's Prize Trial Competition

Harry Wellington

Guido Calabresi

The Clintons and Calabresis

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Laura Kalman’s new book on the Yale Law School is a stunning work of microhistory — no academic institution has ever been studied in greater depth. At the same time, the book also illuminates general developments in American culture during an especially important period in our history.” — Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School

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