Hadar

 

When I attended Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco in the early 1970’s, the course offerings were rather scanty, even though the school was one of the largest and most prestigious in the country and had an interesting faculty, known as the 65 Club, consisting of accomplished legal scholars who were past the traditional retirement age and could no longer teach at other institutions.  But they stuck to the classical subjects-torts, contracts, estates and trusts, constitutional law, civil procedure and the like.  

Over 30 years later I am still on the mailing list and receive the usual fund-raising requests directed to alums, but yesterday I finally received something really interesting-a colorful brochure entitled “New Faculty-Legal Leaders” featuring short bios of the newest additions to the Hastings faculty–”Bringing Life to Law” as the brochure proclaims.  So who are these “Legal Leaders-destined to make a difference” and what distinguishes them from the stodgy old 65 Club of my generation?  According to the brochure, “the distinguished new faculty members at Hastings bring astonishing experiences that strengthen the law school’s well-deserved reputation.  Our legal leaders have clerked for Appeals Court judges, worked in the legal trenches, and advanced knowledge through scholarly works.  They have studied and worked both inside the United Stated and internationally.  They bring the breadth and depth of these experiences to their work at Hastings.”

Back in my day, those esteemed elderly professors may have been renowned experts in their narrow fields, but did their intellectual curiosity lead them in other directions as well?  Were they interested in art, politics, gender, religion, the burning issues of the day?  One never knew, because these things were never revealed.  I certainly never had a woman professor during my three years at Hastings, and the younger ones, selected to fill out the roster for the 65 club, were generally the most dull and boring of the lot, unless you were a big fan of real estate syndication or the intricacies of criminal procedure. 

But today is a new era.  To peruse the list of new professors is to be astonished by how the field of legal scholarship has exploded in a burst of creative energy taking it in directions never before imagined.  A few of them might still fit the traditional mold-Geoffrey Hazard, perhaps, who is “the nation’s foremost expert in legal ethics and a prolific writer of more than 16 books and 175 articles.”  God knows there must be a lot to write about in that area.  Other than being a woman, Heather Field, a tax law specialist, doesn’t break the mold either. From her photo she could just as easily be at home as a CNBC analyst on corporate M&A activity, another of her specialties.  True to his name, Clark Freshman has the fresh look of an earnest young lawyer.  He is a mediator and negotiation trainer-innocuous enough-who focuses on law and psychology, lie detection, and the effect of emotions on dispute resolution.  Wow!  We never discussed emotions back in my days in law school!

Evan Lee is about to publish a book on the impact of social and cultural influences on the development of the standing doctrine. This sounds somewhat subversive, but then it is revealed that before joining Hastings he split his time between general commercial litigation and international regulatory compliance work-hardly a field known to be rife with cultural relativists.

Then we have Joan Williams, a leader in studying the effects of conflict between work and family; Chimene Keitner, whose interests include employment discrimination and human rights litigation; Nancy Stuart, committed to civil rights law; Dorit Rubinstein Reis, with a background in security matters, freedom of speech, welfare services, deregulation, and consumer participation in policy making; and Willie Nguyen, whose Civil Justice Clinic students serve the nearby community by representing workers, tenants, disabled clients and, one can assume, undocumented workers.  Whew.   A long list, but nothing out of the ordinary. These are the things we would expect most law students these days to be interested in.  At least, the idealistic ones.  Certainly no student at Hastings would sign up for a course teaching effective representation of powerful corporate interests-or would they?

But then we diverge into new and exciting territory.  Ethan Leib, for example, who has discovered an area which until now was totally neglected by the law:  friendship!  This sets the mind reeling.  Are we contemplating creating a whole new field of litigation?  Can we sue a friend if they forget our birthday or fail to behave in a friendly way?   Professor Leib explains:  “The law takes a special interest in our families, households, and professional relationships, but our friendships are also regulated by the law in often unnoticed ways.”  Professor Lieb has authored several articles on the subject, including “Friendship and the Law,” “Friends as Fiduciaries,” and “Toward a Public Policy of Friendship-Promotion.”   OK, that sounds friendly enough.  Perhaps we need a new cabinet level Friendship Czar, someone who can take the lead in the War on Unfriendliness.

But the one who especially grabbed my attention was a young Israeli by the name of Hadar Aviram.   Her bio reads as follows: 

“Hadar Aviram recently earned her Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley, where she studied as the Regents Intern and Fulbright Doctoral Fellow.  Her dissertation, winner of the Chancellor Dissertation Award, examined how the Israeli military judicial system perceives and addresses deserters and conscientious objectors.  Professor Aviram has taught at Tel Aviv University Law School, Haifa University Law School, and UC Berkeley, and she is a Global Research Fellow at Goldsmiths College, London. Her recent publications include articles about conscientious objectors and an ethnographic project examining political activism and legal consciousness in the poly-amorous community.  She is the co-author of a new book on the history of female criminality.”

Did I read that correctly:  “An ethnographic project examining political activism and legal consciousness in the poly-amorous community”?  I’d like to read that article, not being aware that poly-amorists had a political and legal agenda—but wait! it turns out that they don’t, and the purpose of her study was to determine why not.  Perhaps, one might venture, its because they are too busy in the bedroom, as implied by the title of one of her articles, “Make Love, Not Law.”

Somehow I couldn’t get Hadar Aviram out of my mind. I found her strikingly beautiful, in a wholesome sort of way. Through obsessive Googling I discovered that she fills her copious free time by playing and singing all genres of music, enjoying dance and theater, practicing and teaching Pilates, learning Traditional Chinese Medicine, practicing acupressure, cooking, making jewelry and devouring books.  I even ordered one of those books-An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears—one of the best she’s ever read, she professed, from which I would learn the multifaceted nature of truth.  She’s also passionate about feminine spirituality and environmentalism, grows her own plants to make tea, and once made an abortive attempt to start a compost pile on her balcony in Tel Aviv. An Israeli by nationality, she served in the IDF and also lived in South America and the Caribbean. She speaks fluent Hebrew, English and Spanish and conversational Arabic.  Oh yes, and she hates ironing.  In a revealing journal entry she describes her adventure with a flat tire:

“An interesting bit of insight today. Perhaps more than a bit. I spent my morning bitching about an acquaintance who gets by in the world by being clueless, needy and childish, and about a colleague who gets by in the world by being a quiet, cute, darling cake-baker. I whined about how these strategies of falling into stereotypes of helpless women and children make men help you, be chivalrous toward you, not hinder you on your path, while “People Like Me”, raised to be lions and wolves and large birds of prey, have to struggle, and prove, and do things ourselves. I was complaining about how hard life is when one seeks camaraderie and respect with men, not dependence and chivalry and assistance. And all the while I was thinking: this is my ugly, envious shadow self speaking. In any case, I couldn’t be childlike or helpless if I wanted; it’s not in my nature.

Then, I left the house. Whoa! Surprise. A flat tire in my golden rental car. Car manual, jack, key thing, ridiculously tiny spare tire come out of the trunk. I will do this by myself.

I work and work on jacking. I haven’t done it right — the car is not lifting at all. Giving up the futile effort, I go back to look at the manual to realize I’ve positioned it in a wrong spot. I restart the positioning, figure out an efficient way to use the key to lift the car. Loosening the screws works like magic when I use my foot and body weight for leverage. In less than an hour, my first flat tire has been changed, and I did it all by myself.

My hands are black and greasy. A sense of personal pride and satisfaction rushes through my body, feeds me with self esteem, autonomy, self sufficiency, trust in myself. The path of the lion and the wolf has its benefits. I would not give this feeling up for nothing.”

Who knows how the path of the lion and the wolf led Hadar to the study of the law, but she has pursued it with ferocity.  Her extensive research interests lie in the crossroads of law, sociology and criminology.  They include theoretical and critical criminology, courts, legal actors and the criminal justice system, inequality, particularly in the context of class, gender and sexual orientation,  queer theory,  social movements and legal consciousness, Foucaultian governmentality, and Luhmann’s systems theory.

Governmentality, Luhmann’s systems theory!  These are things I had never even heard of before.  I scurried to Wikipedia to read up on these obscure topics. Luhmann and his systems theory introduced me to the subject of autopoiesis, the means by which a system (or society) perpetuates itself by reproducing elements previously filtered from an over-complex environment.  According to Wikipedia, Luhmann wrote prolifically, with more than three dozen books published on a variety of subjects, including law, economy, politics, art, religion, ecology, mass media, and love.  He is an advocate of the “grand theory,” aiming to address any aspect of  social life within a universal theoretical framework.  Luhmann himself described his theory as “labyrinth-like” or “non-linear,” and claimed he was deliberately keeping his prose enigmatic to prevent it from being understood “too quickly,” which would only produce simplistic misunderstand.  His relatively low profile outside of his native Germany is partly due to the fact that translating his work is a so difficult, as his writing presents a challenge even to readers of German, including many sociologists.  But not to Hadar!

Governmentality?  Not to be confused with governance.  According to Wikipedia, its a concept first developed by French philosopher Michael Foucault and can be understood as being:

• the way governments try to produce the citizen best suited to fulfill those governments’ policies,
• the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which subjects are governed.

Foucault proved to be a fascinating character.  Unknown to me he had even taught at Berkeley when I was a student in the early 70’s, and took LSD in Death Valley, proclaiming it the best experience of his life, before he died of AIDS at the age of 57.  He was either a structuralist, post-structuralist, deconstructionist,  post-modernist, or something like that.   On reflection, however, it seems a bit odd that a lawyer would be interested in Foucault.  Foucault certainly had no interest in lawyers, or in the law, or in the concept of justice.  For him it was all about power.  He dismissed justice as simply “a claim made by the oppressed class and as a justification for it.”  Perhaps in this age of Foucault lawyers are indeed taught that justice lies simply in seeking more power for those elements of society which claim to be oppressed.  But I’m sure Hadar could explain it all!  

This brief journey led to realize the differences between legal education in my era (a mere three decades ago) and today.  In those simpler times we did not concern ourselves so much with the moral, ethical, or sociological bases of law.  There was the English common law which evolved into our own common law and of course that magnificent creation of our wise forefathers, the Constitution.  Behind all that lay our inherited Judeo-Christian white male European moral values, but it was not necessary to delve into all that.  Things pretty much started with the Constitution, the interpretation of which of course evolved over time to one degree or another, depending on whether you considered yourself a strict constructionist or a judicial activist.    But the new paradigm is to view law as just another construct or system which, as Evan Lee could point out, is a product of various social and cultural influences.   Deconstructed in this way, the law becomes just another tool in the toolbox to be used in the quest for social justice.  Is this terrifying, as today’s rightwingers would have us believe?  Hard to say, but with someone like Hadar blazing the path of the lion and the wolf the outcome is sure to be interesting!

~ by PB on November 29, 2007.