An open access publication of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Spring 2006

Law & the humanities: an uneasy relationship

Authors
Jack M. Balkin and Sanford Victor Levinson
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Author Information

Jack M. Balkin is Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School. His publications include “Cultural Software” (1998) and “The Laws of Change” (2002). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy in 2005.

Sanford Levinson, a Fellow of the American Academy since 2001, is W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law and professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of “Written in Stone” (1998) and “Wrestling with Diversity” (2003) and the editor of “Torture: A Collection” (2004).

In 1930 Judge Learned Hand, widely regarded as one of the most distinguished judges in our nation’s history, spoke to the Juristic Society at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. In his address, “Sources of Tolerance,” he told his listeners,

I venture to believe that it is as important to a judge called upon to pass on a question of constitutional law, to have at least a bowing acquaintance with Acton and Maitland, with Thucydides, Gibbon, and Carlyle, with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, with Machiavelli, Montaigne and Rabelais, with Plato, Bacon, Hume and Kant, as with the books which have been specifically written on the subject.1

Here Hand presents himself as a wise jurist, a legal scholar whose judgment has been profoundly informed by the great books he has selected for our attention. Because he himself is familiar with all of the writers alluded to, he not only enjoys membership in a ‘republic of letters’–he is able to “live greatly in the law.”2

There was nothing particularly unusual about Hand’s range of references in the early twentieth century, particularly coming from an elite member of the legal profession. Moreover, for many years, membership in the American republics of law and letters had run both ways. Robert Ferguson’s important book, Law and Letters in the New Republic, concerns, among other topics, the many late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American writers who had been trained as lawyers (and in many instances, had actually practiced law), including Charles Brockden Brown, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Washington Irving, William Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper.3 One might also think of Hand’s contemporary, the Harvard Law School–educated poet Archibald MacLeish, or, closer to our own time, writers ranging from Louis Auchincloss to Scott Turow and John Grisham.

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Endnotes

  • 1Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand (New York: Knopf, 1952), 81.
  • 2Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Profession and the Law,” in Collected Legal Papers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe, 1920), 29–30.
  • 3See also Michael Meltzer, Secular Revelations: The Constitution of the United States and Classic American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming), 95.