A Reply to Peter Gabel and John Schlegel
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After all these years and at a point in our shared, isolated experience when the 1960s seem only marginally more substantial than Middle Earth, what a pleasure it is to find the Eeyore and imp of critical legal studies—Peter Gabel and John Schlegel—still dancing a tango. This meta-dance of struggle and of tears—a dance that in a Feiffer cartoon might be entitled, “a dance to The Dance”—proceeds, I think, from a source they share: the belief that how things turn out has some bearing, should have some bearing, on what we do. Gabel’s commitment to this belief is expressed most directly in his coda:
To fully realize a spiritual alignment of law and justice will eventually require a post-liberal transformation of our entire legal culture, in which the fostering of empathy, compassion, and mutual understanding among human beings becomes central to what our Constitution and laws and legal processes are meant to help bring into being. But it took 400 years of gradually transforming consciousness to bring about the liberal revolutions of the eighteenth century, and there is no reason we cannot begin the next evolutionary transformation of legal consciousness in our lifetime. Schlegel’s is captured in his powerfully evocative central image:
And so for me the truth of the myth of Sisyphus implies that the best that we humans can expect is that, when tired from endlessly rolling the rock back up the hill, we may gather together at the River Jordan and weep.