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FACULTY-IN-RESIDENCE
Stan Katz, MOVING TO LAPA
Woodrow Wilson School, Director, Center for Arts and Cultural Policy
It is being a real thrill for me to move my o ce to LAPAland. I was one of the original planners of the LAPA program, and I have served on the LAPA Executive Commi ee since the inception of the program. I have had a complicated career, but one of the constants in it has been a commitment to research and teaching in American legal
history and legal policy. Constitutional history was one of my Ph.D. elds, and my rst publication was a scholarly edition of A Brief Narrative of the Case and Tryal of John Peter Zenger by James Alexander. The undertaking of that edition in fact induced me to change my professional orientation from that of a colonial
Peter Brooks, ON LIFE AT LAPA
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Scholar
Comparative Literature and the University Center for Human Values
I have for many years been teaching courses in what has become known as “law and literature”—law and the interpretive humanities might be a be er rubric. In courses at Yale and Virginia and Georgetown law schools, I tried to address what I thought to be missing in the law school curriculum: an a ention to
textuality, to rhetoric, to not only what law says but how it says it. Law school appears to foster a kind of “plum pudding” reading: sticking in your thumb and pulling out a doctrinal plum. In learning to “think like a lawyer,” you don’t indulge in the kind of close and slow reading that
historian to that of a legal historian, and I have never looked back on the decision. I started o professionally as a member of History Department faculties (at Harvard and Wisconsin-Madison), but then I became Professor of Legal History at the University of Chicago Law School, and a teacher of legal history, constitutional law and torts – until I moved to Princeton in 1978 to become the inaugural Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty here at Princeton (a chair now held by my friend Dirk Hartog).
When I rst came to Princeton I was simultaneously a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and I accepted a joint appointment in the Woodrow Wilson School a few years later. I resigned from Princeton to accept the presidency of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1986, a position I held until I retired in 1997, when I returned to a position at WWS – although I also taught regularly at Princeton for the eleven years of my service at ACLS. Since returning I have mainly... Continued on Back Page
is a entive to the ways in which a text (such as a judicial opinion) is making its argument: its voice, forms address, implicit audience, rhetorical devices. When I began teaching at Princeton—a liberal arts university with no law school—I had to think further about the wider horizons of law and literature, and what it could mean to set law in dialogue with the interpretive humanities. That’s what I have been trying to re ect on in a series of seminars entitled “The Ethics of Reading.” That name came from my reaction to reading the “torture memos” composed in the O ce of Legal Counsel of U.S. Department of Justice under the George W. Bush administration in justi cation of the use of torture on detainees. A training in the analysis of literary language, I said to myself, would prevent you from writing such strained and unethical interpretations of statutes. Surely the kind of skills fostered by the interpretive humanities ought to be part of professional education... Continued on Back Page
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