Comments on: Karl Llewellyn and Joseph Smith on the Couch

By: KEDAR PERKINS

KEDAR PERKINS — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:37:18 +0000

DO YOU HAVE ANY CODE BOOKS AVAILABLE FOR CHEAP OR GIVE AWAY,WHAT I REALLY LOOKING FOR IS OLDER CODE BOOKS,AND A OLDER BLACKS LAW DICTIONARY

By: Austin Frost

Austin Frost — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 06:04:13 +0000

I\’m a 1L who is interested in church history. There is an important similarity between Llewellyn and Smith: neither man could properly use a comma.

By: ECS

ECS — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 13:23:58 +0000

Nate, the Lord will bless you for your diligence in making UCC more interesting to your students. That said, I loved my UCC class, and I took distinct pleasure in memorizing the entire Article 9. My outline was a work of art. I’m thinking of donating it to the Smithsonian.

By: MLU

MLU — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 05:05:15 +0000

Most of my education, if that’s what it was, was delivered through Freudian or Marxist interpretations.

It’s a good way to develop an awareness of how many explanations of what other people are “really” up to are just fictions. I don’t get the sense that Fawn Brodie is writing about Joseph Smith at all. Just a fictional character she named after a historical character–one she doesn’t understand very well.

Rarely do I find psychological explanations persuasive, though, like other forms of imaginative writing, they can be quite interesting. They are most maddening, I think, when they take the form of attacks, of which the craze to debunk the work of great figures is the common form today. I imagine we are all fated to have others see our own foibles and weaknesses in a sort of powerful light that Wendell Berry described as being hell–until it is heaven. How do I see others’ problems in a way that increases my fondness for them, and my admiration for them?

I am more likely to enjoy writers who are practicing the arts of reading others’ psyches in that spirit.

By: MDS

MDS — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:20:33 +0000

Nate,

I attended law school at Miami, where Lewellyn is highly revered. 1Ls are expected to come to school having read the Bramble Bush, and take a first semester course called “Elements” which has as a text, “The Theory and Craft of American Law” by Soia Mentschikoff and Irwin Stotsky. The text pays heavy homage to Llewellyn and may be interesting for you and/or your students.

Mentschikoff was Llewellyn’s wife, played a significant role in working on the UCC with him, and served as dean at Miami from 1974 – 1982. She brought with her from U. Chicago many of Llewellyn’s and her comrades and their influence is still strongly felt on the faculty.

A nice biography of Soia is available here: http://library.law.miami.edu/soia.html

By: Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 08:19:44 +0000

Without knowing Llewelyn all that llwell, the comparison to Fitzgerald or Hemmingway seems apt. Sometimes the only difference between the scholarship and the poetry of a given decade is the presence of footnotes (and in the case of “The Wasteland,” not even that). In this case, it seems there’s little difference in how biography writing treats past figures of any kind. That the sexual lives of authors provide special access to their psychology and thus to their texts is an intellectual fashion that I hope has run its course, though. While occasionally enlightening, too often it invites reinterpretation of a vast body of work through a single, limited lens.

By: Nate Oman

Nate Oman — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 02:32:23 +0000

Here is the parallel in simplified form:

(1) The claim that pyschology of a certain stripe holds a key for understanding intellectual production.
(2) The author’s need to reassure the reader that the subject, despite the feet of clay revealed, is still worthy of admiration.

1 is Brodie. 2 is Quinn. I think that the claim in 1 is mistaken. The claim in 2 simply left me with an odd feeling of deja vu. That said, I qualified my skepticism by noting that the addition of detail does give one a better sense of character. I feel like I know Llewellyn better even if I don’t buy into the more grandiose claims the authors make about the link between Llewellyn’s pyschology and the production of the UCC.

I’m not claiming any deeper parallel than that. This is not a deep post, just some odd passing feelings upon reading an article on commercial law (sort of).

By: Susan S.

Susan S. — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 01:36:47 +0000

And how is this parallel to Joseph Smith? We don’t care if he slept with his students, was an alcholic, etc., if he wrote good religion? Not sure it’s exactly parallel? Or am I running too fast here as I settle into my evening meditations on what the net has to offer. . . . .