The current issue of Newsweek features Randall Kennedy. It talks about his five most important books. Pretty intriguing list. Professor Kennedy writes:
1. "The American Political Tradition" by Richard Hofstadter. It ignited my interest in history.
2. "Black Boy" by Richard Wright. It indelibly imprinted on me the horrors my grandparents and parents faced as blacks in the pre-civil-rights Deep South.
3. "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877" by Eric Foner. A magnificent scholarly edifice.
4. "Our Undemocratic Constitution" by Sanford Levinson. A fearless examination of the Constitution by one of the most adventurous (and overlooked) U.S. intellectuals.
5. "Four Quartets" by T. S. Eliot. Because it contains the poem "East Coker," in which one finds the lines: "For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business."
A classic book that disappointed:W.E.B. DuBois's "The Souls of Black Folk" is one of the most lauded books in the African-American canon, but I found it disappointingly thin.
As I say, it's an intriguing list. I need to think about what would be on my top five--perhaps we'd overlap in Foner's Reconstruction--a brilliant and sweeping book. When I first read it I couldn't even begin to imagine how one person could have the knowledge to write such a comprehensive book.
I'd probably include C. Vann Woodward's Strange Career of Jim Crow and Morton Horwitz' Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 and maybe G. Edward White's Marshall Court and Cultural Change, because it gave me a sense of how to combine cultural and intellectual history with legal thought. Wright's Black Boy is a fabulous volume, of course; but for me Ellison's Invisible Man was more influential, because it lead me to understand the response of African American intellectuals to Jim Crow. And it's the source of the title of one of my current projects, "The Great Constitutional Dream Book." Really small tidbits are here and here. And there's some more in the first chapter of Reconstructing the Dreamland.
If we're talking about articles and essays that have influenced us, I would add Kennedy's "Race Relations Law and the Tradition of Celebration: The Case of Professor Schmidt," which appeared in the Columbia Law Review back in 1986.
Close readers of the legal blogosphere may recall that some time ago I suggested that we use appearances in popular culture for ranking faculty. Chalk another one up for Professor Kennedy! Of course, he already has an episode of Boston Public devoted to his book.
You can also read an excerpt of Professor Kennedy's Sellout at the Newsweek website.
Update: I'm not sure this is worthy of an update, because I'm not sure anyone cares about the books that influenced me. However, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou may be the book that has influenced my development as a legal history scholar the most. I read it as a freshman in college lo' those many years ago in a terrific class on social history. And I thought at the time, wow, what an extraordinary way of learning about people who lived centuries ago. It uses court records to reconstruct the community of Montaillou--and now, decades later, that's one of the projects that still consumes my time.
I'm working with a fantastic former student (Stephen Davis) on a study of the probate process in an antebellum Alabama county. I'll be talking more about this shortly; it's shocking to me how much you can wring from probate records, about families, the institution of slavery, and the market in the old South.
Alfred Brophy
Comments