Law and Society as a Vocation—A Play in Three Acts
David M. Trubek
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Plenary Panel
Law and Society Association
Las Vegas, NV
June 3, 2005
What is the difference between a calling and a career? A career marks our work
externally but a calling or “vocation” also speaks with an inner voice and allows us to
find meaning in our work.
The questions I want to address are:
why did I see law and society as a vocation in the beginning of my academic career, and
why, almost 40 years later, do I still see it that way?
You can think of this as a play in three acts.
In Act One, I arrive in the academy after four years doing legal reform in Latin
America and find a vocation in the law and society movement.
I brought to the academic world a distinct sensibility. I sought a vocation that would
contribute to social change. I hoped to promote democracy and equality. I wanted to
pursue this transformative vocation within the law. I believed that academic knowledge
should contribute to emancipation.
I started teaching in the sixties. It was a heady time. Lots of changes were taking place in
the law. There seemed to opportunities for transformative scholarship and action. I
thought I could stretch my wings as an intellectual while continuing my commitment to
reform.
But the legal academy was a disappointment: it neither supported broad-ranging inquiry
nor encouraged transformative action. The mainstream was still devoted to studies of US
legal doctrine and the pursuit of “neutral principles”.
The legal realists’ insight that doctrine was indeterminate and social knowledge needed to
supplement legal logic had not penetrated very deeply. Despite a generation of calls for
interdisciplinary work, there was very little of it, its intellectual reach was limited, and its
practitioners marginal.
And then I encountered the Law and Society Association. It was just getting off the
ground. It offered what I was looking for. In the ideas of people like Willard Hurst,
Lawrence Friedman, Marc Galanter, Stewart Macaulay and Laura Nader, I found the
recognition that legal cultures are contingent, legal systems and society interdependent,
and the proper study of law requires an understanding of other cultures. I also found in
the movement a belief that with the help of social science we could produce the
knowledge that was needed for more effective reform.
And that, I concluded, would be meaningful work. It would allow me to pursue a
transformative vocation and do it within the law. I oriented my scholarship in those
directions, devoted my organizational efforts to help build the field, and tried to integrate
my reform efforts with insights from law and society.
I thought I was on the fast track. But then came Act Two.
2
In Act Two, contradictions emerge and I discover that the path is not so easy and
the vocation more problematic.
Law and society was supportive. It allowed me to range widely in social science and
history while continuing to get support for reform efforts both in the US and Latin
America. It shaped my interests, defined my academic identity, and launched my career.
It did not, however, make for an easy life in the legal academy. The ideas on which Law
and Society was founded nurtured my personal development. But they pulled me away
from mainstream legal scholarship.
And so the first contradiction between my dream of a transformative vocation and the
realities of academic life emerged. The further I went down the law and society road, the
further I distanced myself from the discourses of power within the legal academy. Rather
than finding that power comes with enlightenment, I began ask: must I give up power to
gain enlightenment?
That was painful. But, I thought, I could take solace from the Law and Society
Association and the belief that the future was on our side.
Sure, I told myself, maybe the legal academy today is deaf to science and conflicted
about emancipation. But we in law and society can pursue these twin goals. Sooner later
our time will come. In the meantime, the association would be a “haven in a heartless
world”.
But then I encountered the second contradiction. I discovered there was tension within
Law and Society between the aspiration to science and the hope for emancipation. In the
early days, few of us worried about this. We saw ourselves bringing law and social
science together to strengthen the activist social welfare state and pursue racial and
economic justice. We saw no conflict between science and reform.
3
But this proved to be naïve. Our research sometimes led to disillusion with policy and
concerns about the limits of the law. We showed that reforms may be merely symbolic,
legal discourse can mask power and entrench hegemony, and what looks like reform may
actually be a bulwark of the status quo.
At the same time, some worried that the embrace of reform and focus on policy was
hurting our scholarship. People claimed that “the pull of the policy audience” could
distort our work and hinder efforts to create a robust academic field.
As this debate heated up, external and internal developments had a profound effect. The
country began to tire of reform. The commitment to an activist welfare state began to
unravel. Many of the funding sources that had nurtured the alliance of law, social science
and reform dried up.
At the same time, some in the movement argued for a new vision of the law and society
project. They wanted an independent academic field, replacing the separate disciplines
with a single new discipline. This would move law and society further away from the
legal academy and from reform.
These two developments created fissures within the movement and led to a minor “war of
the methods.” The debates turned on two issues:
Should law and society try to become an independent discipline or should it continue as a
looser association of people from many fields? and
To what degree should law and society scholarship place itself at the service of reform?
Some hoped for a new science while others wanted us to maintain our separate
disciplinary identities. Some thought that the pull of the policy audience would
undermine efforts at real scholarship. Others argued that the commitment to reform gave
the movement much of its energy and attracted needed financial support.
4
I found these debates threatening. For me, the genius of law and society, and the reason it
could be a vocation, was that it allowed me to pursue science and reform, to be an
interdisciplinary scholar and a law professor.
If the movement had to choose between science and reform, and if, to pursue science we
would have to shed our disciplinary affiliations altogether, then it began to look like a
very bad bargain indeed.
But it turned out there was a Third Act.
In Act Thee, a new constitution for law and society emerges and my vocation is
preserved.
Initially I found our war of methods frightening, and feared these debates would weaken
the movement. But in the end they strengthened it and left me convinced that it could be
the home for a calling, not just a job.
The debates fostered personal reflection and institutional reassessment. We looked
inwards to understand our own motivations. We thought more deeply about the nature of
knowledge, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the status of
interdisciplinary studies in the university. We saw the need to incorporate critical
discourses into our work.
There was no decisive victory in the war of methods. A few left to pursue “pure science”
within a single discipline and a few stuck exclusively to reform. But most put the debates
behind them to get on with our day-to-day work. The movement survived the wars and
has continued to grow.
I think the war of methods led to a new vision our enterprise. It helped us redefine our
individual identities and collective aspirations. We might even say it ushered in a new
5
“constitutional moment” in which a consensus is forming around the following
principles:

The goal of the field, and the mission of its institutions, is to create and
disseminate knowledge.

Law and society is an arena in which people from many disciplines can meet
without abandoning their basic academic identities. We celebrate the multiplicity
of disciplines, and do not wish to see them merge into a new science.

We believe in open borders: anyone who seeks to explain the nature of law and its
role in society is welcome.

We are open to all forms of social knowledge, from the most rigorous quantitative
studies to critical analysis of legal discourse.

Knowledge about the law is part of the social construction of reality, and we must
understand how our own discourses affect society.

We pursue no collective policy goals, but we do seek to produce knowledge that
will be useful, and we welcome those who want to use this knowledge for reform.
Could this amalgam of multidisciplinary pluralism, epistemological agnosticism,
reflexivity, and freedom of choice on engagement provide a strong base for the future of
the field? Would it help people like me, as well as people with different sensibilities,
continue to see this work as a calling?
I think so. I think that these principles allow us to learn from each other while
maintaining diverse commitments and identities. We seek to understand the role of law in
society, and society in law. We know just how complex these relations are and how
6
difficult it is to understand them. We look for a place to come together with others
engaged in the same quest.
We need each other. But we join with others not to abandon our identities as sociologists,
or anthropologists, or lawyers, or as scholars, critics or reformers, but rather to pursue our
own goals and do our own jobs better.
Some of us will use this knowledge to develop better theories and others will try to
provide a thicker description of social life.
Some will use it to create better ways to protect human rights while others will try to
improve the procedures for summary judgment.
Each will proceed in their own way. But all can hear that inner voice that tells us:
this is meaningful work, this is a calling.
7