This paper was written for a forthcoming Cambridge University Press anthology titled "On Philosophy in American Law" that commemorates the 75th anniversary of Karl Llewellyn's essay of the same name. Karl Llewellyn was a founder of the Legal Realist movement in American jurisprudence, and his essay is most obviously read as a brief for that movement, in which he argues that a Realist focus on underlying social needs better explains the course of American legal history than do the competing natural (...) law, positivist and formalist schools. Without contesting the merits of this conventional reading, I argue that Llewellyn's essay also makes an implicit case for another, quite different point: the need for Continental philosophical approaches to law in contemporary American jurisprudence. In particular, I argue that the conception of philosophy upon which Llewellyn relies is, with one exception, deeply Hegelian. The one exception lies in Llewellyn's residual belief that, at least to a limited extent, philosophy can change the world as well interpret it. This belief places him squarely in the camp of post-Hegelian thinkers, the camp that also includes contemporary Continental political and legal philosophers. I conclude by suggesting how the post-Hegelian tradition responds to some of the deepest conundrums of contemporary American jurisprudence, using the problem of affirmative action as an example. (shrink)

Drucilla Cornell’s legacy defies easy summary. Thrown out of Stanford for protesting the Vietnam War, by the age of 20 she was organizing sweatshop workers for the United Auto Workers. Union organizing led her to law school (her only post-graduate degree is in law) and eventually a job as a law professor. Meanwhile, a defining encounter with Hegel at the age of 15 launched her intellectual trajectory, which would be followed by various schools of post-Hegelian thought (the Frankfurt School, Derridian (...) deconstruction, Lacanian psychoanalysis, among others), feminisms both practical and theoretical, Rawlsian liberalism and, in her final work, African and Afro-Caribbean philosophy (I am leaving aside her plays and book on Clint Eastwood). Ecumenicism of this breadth can be a sign of shallow thinking. In her case, however, she had a sustained engagement with each tradition of thought, aimed at coaxing its essence from its native vocabulary in the faith that productive dialog is possible between radically different, and even opposed, intellectual traditions. In this reminiscence and memorial piece, I remember Drucilla as a teacher, mentor and friend. (shrink)