LAW PUNDIT Thursday, October 14, 2004 10/14/2004 11:52:00 PM [Home]
Larry D. Kramer - New Stanford Law School Dean
Larry D. Kramer - New Stanford Law School Dean
Stanford Law School has a new Dean, the 12th, Larry D. Kramer, who comes to Palo Alto from NYU. Kramer has a remarkable biography insofar as he initially did not really want to go to law school at all but did so to placate his mother. At the University of Chicago Law School he was lucky to meet Edward H. Levi (former U.S. Attorney General), who opened Kramer's eyes to "how interesting the law was".
In the Stanford Lawyer, Fall, 2004 in "From the Big Apple to The Farm"
[the Big Apple is New York City and "the Farm" is an insiders' designation for Stanford, which used to be the farm of Leland Stanford Sr.], Kramer relates that:
"I had the typical lay person's view of law school, that you learned a bunch of rules that weren't very interesting, and then spent your life lying and manipulating the rules to make a bunch of money."
As Eric Nee writes in the article, Levi changed Kramer's view from ambivalence to inspiration in his "Elements of Law" course. Kramer elaborates that:
"Levi's course was designed to show the way in which everything met at the law. We started with Socrates and ended at Roe v. Wade, with a little bit of everything in between....
Kramer was particularly intrigued by the fact that many sets of arguments in law had a history running back hundreds of years and that these arguments could be traced.
The Law Pundit found the above observation to be significant in view of our hectic modern age, which often misleads us to the view that "arguments" have right and wrong aspects and that there is some finite conclusion to them. In the law - and, optimally, in the legally trained mind - sets of arguments are not finite entities distinguishing the right view from the wrong view, but are rather ongoing processes, shaped by events over time and embedded in the society in which such arguments arise, a society which is in a constant state of change.
In that same spirit of change, Kramer writes in his opening communication to Stanford entitled "Building on Excellence" (Stanford Lawyer, Fall, 2004) that:
Legal education and scholarship, like education and scholarship generally, have been radically transformed in recent decades. Old disciplinary boundaries have dissolved.... We are an interdisciplinary institution - and will become more so in the coming years.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 10/14/2004 11:52:00 PM
Larry D. Kramer - New Stanford Law School Dean
Larry D. Kramer - New Stanford Law School Dean
Stanford Law School has a new Dean, the 12th, Larry D. Kramer, who comes to Palo Alto from NYU. Kramer has a remarkable biography insofar as he initially did not really want to go to law school at all but did so to placate his mother. At the University of Chicago Law School he was lucky to meet Edward H. Levi (former U.S. Attorney General), who opened Kramer's eyes to "how interesting the law was".
In the Stanford Lawyer, Fall, 2004 in "From the Big Apple to The Farm"
[the Big Apple is New York City and "the Farm" is an insiders' designation for Stanford, which used to be the farm of Leland Stanford Sr.], Kramer relates that:
"I had the typical lay person's view of law school, that you learned a bunch of rules that weren't very interesting, and then spent your life lying and manipulating the rules to make a bunch of money."
As Eric Nee writes in the article, Levi changed Kramer's view from ambivalence to inspiration in his "Elements of Law" course. Kramer elaborates that:
"Levi's course was designed to show the way in which everything met at the law. We started with Socrates and ended at Roe v. Wade, with a little bit of everything in between....
Kramer was particularly intrigued by the fact that many sets of arguments in law had a history running back hundreds of years and that these arguments could be traced.
The Law Pundit found the above observation to be significant in view of our hectic modern age, which often misleads us to the view that "arguments" have right and wrong aspects and that there is some finite conclusion to them. In the law - and, optimally, in the legally trained mind - sets of arguments are not finite entities distinguishing the right view from the wrong view, but are rather ongoing processes, shaped by events over time and embedded in the society in which such arguments arise, a society which is in a constant state of change.
In that same spirit of change, Kramer writes in his opening communication to Stanford entitled "Building on Excellence" (Stanford Lawyer, Fall, 2004) that:
Legal education and scholarship, like education and scholarship generally, have been radically transformed in recent decades. Old disciplinary boundaries have dissolved.... We are an interdisciplinary institution - and will become more so in the coming years.
Permalink : Andis Kaulins : 10/14/2004 11:52:00 PM
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