Synopses & Reviews
In 1983 Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy self-published a biting critique of the law school system called
Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy. This controversial booklet was reviewed in several major law journals—unprecedented for a self-published work—and influenced a generation of law students and teachers.
In this well-known critique, Duncan Kennedy argues that legal education reinforces class, race, and gender inequality in our society. However, Kennedy proposes a radical egalitarian alternative vision of what legal education should become, and a strategy, starting from the anarchist idea of workplace organizing, for struggle in that direction. Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy is comprehensive, covering everything about law school from the first day to moot court to job placement to life after law school. Kennedy's book remains one of the most cited works on American legal education.
The visually striking original text is reprinted here, making it available to a new generation. The text is buttressed by commentaries by five prominent legal scholars who consider its meaning for today, as well as by an introduction and afterword by the author that describes the context in which Kennedy wrote the book, including a brief history of critical legal studies.
Review
“Duncan Kennedy's critique of legal education now gets the wide distribution it deserves. Kennedy's insightful skewering of legal education, supplemented by his own reflections on the work and views of other legal educators, will provide prospective law students with a flavor of what they are in for — and will remind lawyers of what they went through. Kennedy's message is as important today as it was two decades ago when he first penned this work.”
“Duncan Kennedy’s little red book has become a classic. But now with its republication twenty years later, Kennedy's ‘polemic against the system’takes us beyond its origins as a field guide to legal education. Amplified by the voices of other distinguished scholars, this stunning collection of essays forces us to consider the ways in which hierarchies and their resulting social alienation disfigure contemporary society, not just our law schools.”
“Kennedy’s book remains one of the defining blows of critical legal studies and an enduring challenge to the entire structure of legal education. It remains as vital, incisive and daring as when it first appeared.”
“An important founding text in the history of critical approaches to law taken by scholars located in law schools.”
Review
“A well-written, accessible, nicely balanced series of ethnographic cases—for those of us hungry to know more about the realities of fair trade on the ground, this volume is a nourishing meal of many courses.”
-Peggy F. Barlett,Goodrich C. White Professor of Anthropology, Emory University
Review
“This outstanding collection not only serves as an accessible introduction to Fair Trade but illuminates the gap between the sunny rhetoric and the actual practice. With ethnographic richness and nuance, the authors complicate our understanding of the market as a means of achieving economic and social justice.”
-Lisa Markowitz,,Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Louisville
Review
"This book is a significant contribution to the anthropological case study literature on fair trade that will give yuppies and more redical fair trade consumers, researchers and activists alike something to think about."-Ian Hussey,Socialist Studies
Review
“An important founding text in the history of critical approaches to law taken by scholars located in law schools.”
-The Law and Politics Book Review,
Synopsis
This well-known 'underground' classic critique of legal education is available for the first time in book form. This edition contains commentary by leading legal educations.
Synopsis
By 2008, total Fair Trade purchases in the developed world reached nearly $3 billion, a five-fold increase in four years. Consumers pay a “fair price” for Fair Trade items, which are meant to generate greater earnings for family farmers, cover the costs of production, and support socially just and environmentally sound practices. Yet constrained by existing markets and the entities that dominate them, Fair Trade often delivers material improvements for producers that are much more modest than the profound social transformations the movement claims to support.
There has been scant real-world assessment of Fair Trades effectiveness. Drawing upon fine-grained anthropological studies of a variety of regions and commodity systems including Darjeeling tea, coffee, crafts, and cut flowers, the chapters in Fair Trade and Social Justice represent the first works to use ethnographic case studies to assess whether the Fair Trade Movement is actually achieving its goals.
Contributors: Julia Smith, Mark Moberg, Catherine Ziegler , Sarah Besky, Sarah M. Lyon, Catherine S. Dolan, Patrick C. Wilson, Faidra Papavasiliou, Molly Doane, Kathy M'Closkey, Jane Henrici
About the Author
Duncan Kennedy is Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard University School of Law. He is the author of a number of books and articles, including A Critique of Adjudication [fin de siècle] and Sexy Dressing, Etc.: Essays on the Power and Politics of Cultural Identity.