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Good afternoon!
My name is Roberta Shaffer
I am the Law Librarian of Congress
and it is indeed a pleasure for me
to welcome you to the Library of Congress this afternoon
for the inaugural lecture of the Fred R. and Molly S.
lectures in Jurisprudence
This will be a biennial event
and you can say to your grandchildren
that you were here at the beginning of it all
I'd like to acknowledge the Kelloggs
just by having memorize for moments
so that we can really show by our applause
how much we appreciate their generosity
in creating this phenomenal event
Molly and Fred
Thank you so much
There are a number of dignitaries in the audience and
I will ask your indulgence
because we are so interested
in having as much time as possible for our lecture
I am not going to acknowledge you
but it's a pleasure to have everyone here today
And I want to also applaud you
for coming this afternoon
to weeky event today in Washington D.C.
I don't know about you but I am skipping
the Mark Twain Award this evening
at the Kennedy Center because I know
that it will be given to Bill Cosby
because I know that it really will be impossible
for the Mark Twain Award
to really upstage the award
and the lecture that we are about to hear
Before I turn the floor over to Fred Kellogg
who will introduce professor Dworkin
I just wanna to let you know that the Kellogs
have very very generously in-and-out as well
a reception that will follow the lecture
and everyone is invited to attend that
It will be in Madison hall in the Madison building
which is just on the very first level
of the lobby of the Madison building
across the street from this building
And we hope that you will all be able to attend
and to discuss other issues or further issues
with professor Dworkin
and react among yourselves
to some of the things that he has said
So without further ado I present Fred Kellogg
Thank you very much
Good afternoon all
thank you all for being here
I am very happy that
my wife and I have found
a small way
to contribute to the future
of the Library of Congress
the institution for which
it is so important
the Law Library
the Law
the Legal Profession, the Legal Community
and the scholars who were here
and young and more advanced
scholars I know many are here
And I am also happy that
we found some way
to remember
Molly Schumann Kellogg
for her work on Hill
She came to
Washington D.C.
on her way to Germany
in 1965
and she stopped by
her congressman's office
and her congressman who
was J.J. 'Jake' Pickle
told her
"Well, be nice if you'd go to Germany
a little later but
why wouldn't you work for me. This is a time to be in Washington.
Lyndon Johnson is the President
and things were happening
And just stay for a year".
So
she stayed and
she eventually worked for him
for thirty years
And many here recall
what she did
on Hill as the staff member
bringing people together
bringing
many young men and women
who married, who met in the office
who probably introduced by my wife
and the effect
she has had on their personal lives
Well, so now why
a lecture and
why jurisprudence
Lectures are
events
they are
unlike a book
they are contemporary
event, they are in the moment
they are performances
they are like a symphony
or a play or a sporting event
they inspire
Why jurisprudence
Jurisprudence is a topic that engages
so many aspects of our culture
the intellectual aspect
the legal aspect
how we order ourselves in our lives
it engages philosophy
The track
the train
the ongoing developing world
of philosophy
as we use its way into jurisprudence
Reason, civilization
harmony, our lives
My wife and I
are isolated from
the selection process but we are
very happy that Ronald Dworkin
is the inaugural speaker for
these lectures
You all
have in your program
summary of his
background and I won't
go into that except to say that
the most important thing for me was that he
was a clerk for
George Learned Hand
and I worked
for another
clerk for Learned Hand
the attorney general
you may remember, Elliot Richardson
And
Hand
those of you who read jurisprudence
know
that Hand in 1958
gave a lecture
series, actually, of lectures
at Harvard, the Oliver Wendell Holmes lectures
And the result
of that was to shakeup
the world of
jurisprudence and constitutional
law in his
criticism
of the power of the
Supreme Court in our lives
and this set off
the train of intellectual
events that
was not unrelated
to our lecture today
who less than ten year later
shook up
the world of jurisprudence in a different way
by challenging
the then
dominant school of
legal positivism
as articulated by
the famous professor
Herbert Hart at Oxford
For those of you who know
the record
you know that this
is not a boring game
it's a highstakes game
and ever since
Ronald Dworkin wrote that first
essay "The model of rules"
he's been in
high pressure environment
Imagine, let's say
unimaginably
long fifth-set
at Wimbledon
without a tiebreaker
or perhaps more
appropriately like Roger
Federer always having to defend
his title year after year
That's
my sense of the
activity that
Ronald Dworkin has been maintaining
in this field
The issues
they relate to the Supreme Court
the role of the Constitution
our system of government
our responsibility in that system
and
professor Dworkin's particular
contribution has been to
highlight the role of legal
and moral principles in this
important area
Our topic
today being interpretational
close with a brief story, one of my
favourites about
Justice Holmes's famous
friend, the legal scholar
Frederick ***
who was
known as FP
and was renown
also for his torts eternity
***'s cousin
Lord Hanworth who was
the Master of Rolls
third-highest judge
judge in England or the MR
chanced to meet FP
at one end of Chancery Lane
one day early in last century
and he accompanied him the entire Lane
Chancery Lane without FP
uttering a single
word
As Harold Laski later
wrote to Justice Holmes
The MR was
rather angry and began
to cherish a grudge
But four days later he met
Leslie Scott who said to him
"I met FP the other day
and he had told me he had
the most delightful chat with you"
The lesson
interpretations
may differ at the moment
We have to give them time
Time is what
Molly and I hope to contribute
in establishing and eventually endowing
these series of lectures. Thank you.
To great honour, of course
to be asked to inaugurate
this series
and I joy in the thanks
to Molly and Fred Kellogg
for making it possible
Being in this
building is also an enormous
treat to me
I have never been here before (Thomas Jefferson Building).
To have so many
people come in the
middle of the sunday afternoon
to hear me is also
quite remarkable
It all puts
me in mind
of the conversation I had
with that same Learned Hand
Fred described
One day
he said to me across
the two desks of two joined together
Do you ever think
about heaven?
No, I said, not much
It's well, I do
Would you be
would you like me
to tell you what heaven is like?
I said, yes, I'd be
eternally grateful
He ignored that
And he said: I'll tell you
A day in heaven begins
with a polo
match. Hand
is the captain of the heavenly
horse and he scores goal
after goal all on his
thunderous hit and
the stands ring
with his name: "Go, Hand!"
And then there's
lunch, before lunch
martinis
And the conversation
at lunch is wonderful
as you would expect given who
was there
After lunch football
game, American football
Hand is a quarterback
for the good side
He passes
he sneaks
he engineers
an amazing victory
and the stands roam with his name
"Go, Hand!"
And then comes dinner
And the martinis are much
drier at
dinner
And then dinner
If you
thought the talk at
lunch was good you
ought to have been at dinner
Epigram
followed epigram
in the crescendo of
wit and elegance
until suddenly a voice
was heard to cry out
"Shut up, Voltaire!
I want to hear what Hand
is saying!"
My subject today is
interpretation, my question
is the truth to be had
in interpretation
You're all
familiar with
the controversies that
we are lawyers
are professors
are judges, are justices
have about interpretation
Some of them are very grand
Does the second amendment properly
interpreted
give us
as individuals the right
to have firearms?
Does the second amendment apply
to the states?
Does the first amendment
apply to cooperations
and protect them
when they make Hillary
the movie?
Some of the questions
are much less grand
They are questions about right interpretation
of the Uniform Commercial Code
or precedence governing
the law of negotiable
instruments
We disagree
at every level
and we are as a
profession and individually
one by one
ambivalent about
that disagreement
Is
the truth to be had
are we
contesting what
the truth is. That is
certainly, to use a grand
phrase, the phenomenology
of most lawyers
We read
we puzzle
we puzzle again
then we come to a judgement
and it's a
judgement, not a choice
It doesn't feel
like a preference, it feels
like a judgement about
what the truth is
Imagine a judge
Who's just sentenced
a villain
to jail or
perhaps worse
And then says at the end of his opinion
of course that's
the way I see it
that's my opinion, that's way I read it
but there're other
interpretations and they are equally
good
We would want that judge send
to jail
And yet
and yet
When we
stand back and look at the
character of the disagreement
it seems odd
to say this truth
to be had
Why?
Because the disagreements in interpretation
are intractable
pervasive
and endless
We divide into
tribes: regionalists
moral
readers and the rest
We divide into these
tribes and no tribe
has much to say
that's going to influence
that alone convince
the other side. The disagreement
simply continues. Indeed
this can be a personal
situation. A judge
may write an opinion
that feels right to him
that day but he might
discard it in favor of a different
one that feels right to him
another day. There's
not much she can say
except I see it
differently
and that doesn't seem
to sort well with
truth. It's that ambivalence
which is my subject this
afternoon. How can we
resolve it?
I want to approach that
question however
by making it a bigger
question
Law is only one
area in
which we interpret
Interpretation is
a general pervasive feature
it's a department of human
reason. And I want
to ask, is there
truth in interpretation
in general
We interpret in many
different ways
and occasions
You, I hope
are interpreting me
right now
as I speak. You are trying
to decide what it is
that I mean to say
Sociologists
interpret cultures
and institutions
historians
interpret ages
of events and
epics
literary and artistic critics
interpret
poems, plays and
paintings, priests and
rabbies interpret
sacred text
psychoanalysts
interpret your
dreams. And in all
of these different genres
as I'll call them
of interpretation, there are
different separate
houses
Lawyers interpret
wills, contracts
constitutions and
statutes. And they debate
among themselves whether
the same approach is appropriate
for each
Literary and artistic
critics debate such
apparently desperate questions
as the importance
of moral
value in
discerning the meaning
of a poem
Whether
Piero Della Francesca's great painting
there's Christ
in sense Apocra really
is a Christian painting or
whether as some eminent critics
claim it's a pagan
painting
Did Lady
Macbeth have a lover
before she married
Glamis?
Now in
as to all of these
questions the
same ambivalence
arises. On the
one hand
the phenomenology of criticism
what it feels
like to do it
is objective supposing
this truth to be had
in the interpreter seeks the
truth. On the other hand
the nature of the disagreement is
such that it seems
odd
indeed hubristic
to suppose that there is
any sets truth
The phenomenology, it seems to me
clear. Imagine
a scholar who spent his entire life
writing
a tome, twelve hundred pages,
on Hamlet and in the
last page says: "Well, though
it is, that's
how I see it, of course, there are
many other opinions
equally good as mine"
Wouldn't that be crazy?
Two
of the most eminent
critics of the last century
put the matter the case
for
the objectivity
this way.
F.R. Leavis, a great critic
at Cambridge, said:
"A real
critical judgment
of its villainy nature
always means to be wore
the merely personal
Essentially
a critical judgment has the form
This is so, isn't it?
And his American
counterpart, the
I think, founder
of the
new criticism movement
Cleanth Brooks, said this:
Cleanth Brooks,said this:
"I suppose that the practising critic
can never be too
often reminded of the gap
between his reading
and the true reading
of the poem
The alternatives are
desperate. Either we say
that one person's reading is
as good as another's
or else we take the
lowest common denominator
of the various readings
that have been made"
That is how it feels
to the critic
knowing that they disagree as
Leavis and Brooks in fact did
And yet again
The disagreements
are intractable
and pervasive just as we
have tribes of
legal interpreters. So we have
tribes of
literary interpreters
the new critics
the author's intension school
the structuralist, the post-strusturalist
the deconstructualist
every post-
and every de-
and everything you can think of
They are all on the field
they talk to each
other, they do not
convince, they do not budge
and on the go as
separate tribes
So, no wonder
their sceptical
view
the view that says
Leavis and Brooks
are deceiving
themselves, there is no
right answer, there are only different
answers to questions of
interpretation across all
the genres I mentioned
No wonder that view is appealing
But it's now a time for me
to suggest you
that the sceptical view
though appealing
for all the reasons I've suggested
is in fact
incoherent
it's self-contradictory
Why?
Imagine
those two critics
Leavis and Brooks
both very eminent
they disagree
about the correct
reading
of many poems including
Yeats's wonderful
"Among school children"
Many of you will know that
poem is the one that ends: "but who
can tell the dancer
from the dance"
Leavis, who didn't
in general admire
Yeats adored
that poem because he said
it contains morally
irresistable truth
Brooks completely disagreed
He said it's
a poem about the
metaphysical boundary between
the natural and the supernatural
We might come back to that
later on. But now
imagine authoritative critic
who arrives on this
scene and says: "You are both
wrong. You are making
the mistake of thinking this one
true reading and the
others are just mistakes
You both wrong
there's no such truth
Now I ask you
what could make
the third critics opinion
right?
It can't be made
right by metaphysics
it can't be made right
by science, it can't
be made right by sociology
The third opinion
there're-no-right-answer opinion
is itself
an interpretation
It's an interpretation of
"Among school children"
It needs an argument
It suffers from exactly
the same difficulties
as the first two interpretations
It can't
convince anyone
it's ephemeral
it's not demonstrable. If these
characteristics
count against Brooks
and count against Leavis
the count against the sceptic
as well
But the sceptic says
that there's no truth in interpretation
and he contradicts
himself because
he must claim truth
for his own interpretation
This point
which I believe to be very important
is often
obscured because
we failed to make
a necessary distinction
between two phenomena:
uncertainty and scepticism
People often
treat scepticism
as the default
position
If no positive position
Leavis or Brooks
is convincing
if there are number of positions
and none of them is
convincing
then the sceptic must be right
there's no right answer. But the true
default is uncertainty
That's what you are
entitled to claim
if nothing persuades you
To claim more
to claim scepticism
is to make an
independent interpretation
which puts you
out on the lim
of truth as formerly
formerly as any positive interpretation does
So
appealing though it is
popular though it is
I think we must set
interpretive scepticism aside
scepticism of a grand kind
we must set it aside
But that
isolates the question
if there's truth
inspite of all these
intractable disagreements
where can that
truth lie?
What can make
an interpretation true?
There's a very popular answer
to that question. It's popular
in law, it's popular
in many other places
That's the psychological state
answer. An interpretation
is an attempt
to retrieve from history
the intension
of some
author or creator
Did Jessica
Shylock's daughter
hate her father because
she was ashamed of her
jewishness?
That simply asks
under psychological state
view was that
what Shakespeare intended
in writing her
lines in the play
Now
the
appeal of
the psychological state theory
is irresistable
in some genres
of interpretation
Conversation, for example. As I said
said I hope you are interpreting
me as I speak
But that means you are trying
to capture a psychological
state. That is what
I am trying to say
to you what I hope you will
understand. That's my
psychological state
The psychological state theory is
ridiculous
in some other genres
People who write
historians who write
about the meaning of the French
revolution are not
trying to find out what was in the mind
of the Jacobin
as they rioted
and killed
It's ineligible. I believe
popularly as it is
that the psychological
state theory is actually
ridiculous in law
What do the congressmen
who voted for the statute intend?
He intended to get reelected
and appease his contributors
And that has nothing to
do what how we read
the statute
In the middle
in literary
and artistic interpretation
the author's intension
theory as it's called
has waxed and
waned, flourished
and disappeared
. In the nineteenth century
the age of romanticism
it was very popular
And by the end
of the twentieth, after
new critics arrived
it was deemed not eligible
The French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur
in a very nice phrase said:
"The author is only
the first reader
Nothing more"
Tom Stoppard
playwright, had a
what I think, a wonderful
image, he said: "The relation
between the playwright
and the interpreter
is like the relation
between the passenger
and the custom's inspector
Custom inspector
finds things in the suitcase
that the passenger has
to agree are there
but knows he didn't pack"
And
that in
Stoppard's image
captures the relationship between
the creator
creates something
and the critic
who finds something innate
that the author had
not only known intentionally
put there but was ignorant until
he learned was there
So, the psychological state
theory is not
eligible
for the role that I see
I would like to
find a general theory
of interpretation that
holds across these
genres of interpretation
and the psychological
state theory is not that
But it does its
popularity does
present a challenge to anyone
composing a general theory
a general theory must
explain why it is
that the psychological state theory
is irresistable
in some genres
not eligible in other
genres and controversial
in the middle
Now you might ask
what is this. I am clearly
building up to an attempt
to describe a general
theory that fits
all the genres, meets that
conditions and the others that
we might want to impose
I am going to describe this
general theory. I call it
the responsibility
theory of interpretation
And I am going to describe it
into scalars, in way first perhaps
cryptic way and then try
to flesh it out with some
examples
We begin with the
recognition that
interpretation is a
collective activity
We
interpret, we can
interpret statutes
or sacred texts or
paintings because
because others have done that
in the past. We join
a tradition
and as we interpret
objects so
we interpret the tradition
that we have joined
T.S. Eliot said once
that a poet
interprets the history
of the poetry as he creates
a new poem and I am
making the same claim which I'll try
illustrate in a moment
on behalf of interpretation
Second
interpreters
those who have joined
and continue this tradition or
practice of interpretation
suppose that the
practice has some
point. It's not
an idol exercise
it embodies some
value. And
it embodies an
interpretative responsibility
that flows
from that value
And people who join
an interpretative
tradition
agree
generally
about the purpose that it
serves but agree only
at a very high level of
abstraction. Lawyers
interpreting documents
and constitutions
might agree that the
aim is somehow
to serve justice
Critics
might agree
that the aim of
artistic or literary
criticism is
to identify
and make available
all when appropriate
to deny
artistic excellence
Yes, we
can agree, but
as soon as we make the description
even
somewhat less abstract
then we fall
fall into disagreement
Consider
two
American lawyers
disagree about the right way to
interpret the Constitution
They disagree
about the nature
of constitutional law
Why?
Probably
because they disagree
about the best conception of
democracy
They begin with
the idea that there
is a division of power
and authority between
interpreters and
original creators but
they disagree
because they disagree about
the best interpretation of democracy
about where the
balance of power
lies, what the responsibility
of the judge is
They disagree about
democracy perhaps they disagree
about the more basic
principles
of legitimacy
They might disagree about
legitimacy because
they disagree about
dignity
independence and a vast
array of other values
I'm not of course
suggesting that
this tree-structure
of principle
branching out with the thousand
points of potential disagreement
is visible to
the interpreters
No, their interpretive approach, to fall
back on the
over-use metaphor, is the tip
of the iceberg
It's what is available
self-consciously that they
identify making them members
of some tribe. But the great
ice mass that lies
below the surface
of consciousness
formed
by instinct
training and experience
unavailable to
them is nevertheless
there exercising
its influence
giving the interpreter
a sense that there's truth
to be had and
obscuring from him
the true basis of
his claim, the true basis
of the controversy
I'm suggesting
with that illustration
with others I hope to offer you
I'm suggesting that we
think of truth in interpretation
in a following way
the true interpretation of some
object, a poem
a painting, a provision
of the Constitution
is the reading of that
which
best acquits
the responsibility of
of interpreters given
by the best interpretation
of the practice they have
joined. Interpretation
is multiply
interpretive, it's interpretive
all
the way down
Now
one thing this
picture of interpretation is
interpretive responsibility
rising out of
a deeper interpretation
one advantage of this
that it serves what I believe
to be a useful way
to distinguish families
of interpretive genres
And to be very
quick about it
These
families can be distinguished
in the following way among no
doubt others. First
we distinguish collaborative
interpretation
This is the
set of interpretive genres
in which the interpreter
properly takes himself or herself
to be in
partnership with
someone who came before
and created the object
of interpretation
The musician playing
a sonata
is in partnership with the composer
the critic studying
a play is in
partnership with the playwright
The judge is in
partnership with someone
who he identifies
having made the law
that he interprets
I distinguish collaborative from
explanatory interpretation
Explanatory interpretation
includes history
The historian
of the Holocoust
does not take himself
to be a partner
of the Nazis in any respect
Explanatory
interpretation
studies history
not the details of history
not what happened when
but the meaning of
historical events and epochs
by drawing from
the raw data
what he takes to be important
to provide an important
lesson for his audience
There's a third family
of interpretation
which I would call
conceptual interpretation
I won't say
anymore about it this afternoon
except to note
that in my view all of
philosophy is conceptual
interpretation
of concepts that we
share
A main subject is
collaborative
interpretation
because law
belongs to
collaborative interpretation
like a conversation and
like literary interpretation
But I'll talk
talk first about
literary interpretation
I want to suggest to you that
we best
understand disagreements
between or among
critics by tracing out the
underground or
assumed and
sometime quite
self-conscious attitude of a
critic to the
apparently
different question
where does the value of the literature
lie
I'm suggesting
that this view of
interpretation erodes
the difference
that seems natural
between two questions
What makes a poem
good?
And what does this particular poem
mean?
I'm gonna
read you something
from a recent
compendius that's understatement
anthology of
about sixteen hundred pages
of literary criticism
and in the introduction
by the
four compilers of this
anthology we find this:
"Theories of literature
and theories of reading
have affinities with one another
Here are four
instances. First
the formalist idea
of a literature
is a well-made artistic
artistic object corresponce to
the notion of reading
as careful explication
and devaluation
of dense poetic style
Second
when viewed as
the spiritual expression of a gifted
seer
poetry elicits a
biographical approach to criticism
focus on the poets
in the development
Third
dense historical symbolic
works presuppose
the theory of reading
as exegesis or
decipherment
Fourth, literature
concede as social text or
discourse calls for cultural
critique
while we can separate
theories of literature from
theories of interpretation
they often work
hand in hand
I don't ask you to
agree with the
four-part analysis
offered in this
introduction to that massive compilation
but I'd ask you to consider
the underlying hypothesis
which is that in
order to understand why
an interpretor interprets
as he does we have to
understand what his
theory is of excellence
in the object he
interprets and therefore
his sense of orders responsibility is
I mentioned Yeats's
"Among school children"
A sixty year old
smiling public man
visits a school room
and is
attracted
by a
particular school girl
bending over
her desk
Yeats's
most eminent biographer
Roy Foster
notes
that three days before he wrote
this poem Yeats
visited a Catholic school
Saint Otteran's
in Ireland
and that he often
refered to his visit
as a senator
of the Irish senate when
discussing educational
reform in Ireland
Foster also tells us
that the
Ledaean figure
as Yeats called her
of the little schoolgirl
was actually
Maud Gonne
Yeats's
long ago
lover, now
like himself "hollow of cheek"
So, Foster reads this
as a critique
of public education
and reads the
particular reference
to this mythological figure
as a reference to his
now elderly once
beautiful lover
I mentioned this in that
detail because
decades earlier
Cleanth Brooks whom I mentioned
before
wrote us exactly against this
interpretation
died before Foster was born probably
He wonders against it
he said: "It would
be a terrible mistake to read
this poem as a political
comment
and of course, he said
it would be leave in worse mistake
to identify the Leadean
figure with Maud Gonne
and an identification
to which play
Pythagoras are particularly
and ironiously drone"
Now
how shall we understand that?
We might say, well, Brooks
is offering
an account of the poem
is as a piece of literature
and Foster
is explaing how
the poem game derry written
in the way that it did
Difference between interpretation
collaborative and explanation
like history
I don't think that we work
Brooks looked forward
to this interpretation
he disliked as
a mistake
And Foster offers
it as a reading
of the poem not
as a piece
itself of biography
Not in order
to understand this disagreement
you know let's see how this
two critics disagreed
with one another rather
than simply complemented each other
we have to attend
their theories of what is great
in literature
Brooks as I said a new critic
held
that a poem
has its deep value
as
an expression
of an idea
which has
to be contained
within the poem itself
it has to be there
in the poem
independent of any
information we can bring to
it about the poet
or the moment in which he lived
It must resist
him for emphasize
paraphrase it must be
something can only be said
in a poem that
couldn't be put any other way
giving us a sense
as he thought
of this particular poem, given
given us a sense of deep
metaphysical truth. He thought
this was a platonic
this poem, half-way
to great Byzantium
poem is that
Yeats wrote later
So, here you have
two critics whose
work I think can only be understood
in that way
I'm going to read you
a passage
from another
famous poet
Samuel Tailor Coleridge
writing at the high
of the Romantic Movement
explaining why
interpretation
must be just
must be the recovery
of the genius
of the poet
the psychological state theory
Here's Coleridge: "What
is poetry? It's
so nearly the same question
with what is the poet
that the answer to the one
is involved the solution
of the other. For it is
a distinction resulting from
the poetic genius itself
which sustains
and modyfies the images thoughts
and emotions of the poets
own mind. He defuses
a tone and spirit of unity
that blends and as
it refuses each into each
by that synthesis
and magical power
to which we have exclusively
appropriated the name of
imagination"
You can see
from that immediately
the spirit, the ground
of the authors intention
school of criticism
which flourished in the romantic
period. We retrieve
the genius of the
poet which
fuses itself into the
right understanding of
the poem. Contrast that
with the image created
as I told you by
Tom Stoppard
Here's another
illustration
I think even more dramatic
The eighteenth century
French painter Antoine Watteau
painted as most of you
will be familiar with his work
Scenes that on the surface
or Scenes of frivolity, gaiety
and so he was regarded
by his eighteenth century
contemporary interpreters
who celebrated
the joy as freedom
and almost effeminate
lightness of his paintings
I relief after
the saviour days
of Louis The Sun King
that had come to an end
By the more
sober nineteenth century
the critics
opinion of Watteau
had gone a hundred and eighty degrees
in the other
direction. Watteau
was regarded as melancholy
tragic
a painter
of isolation
despair
Recently
I read in The New York Review: Books
another
comment on
Watteau:
"the critic, -
- according to this writer, - wants to
steep Watteau's paintings
in the world he, the critic
contemporarily inhabits
and vice versa
Watteau's own
moment of novelty
gets overlaid with the many
versions of the modern that ensued
The painting of the Pierrot
Gilles, taps into
the revival of mime-theater in eighteen-thirthies, Paris
And the resuscitation
of that revival
in Marcel Carnes great film
of nineteen forty five
"Les enfants du paradis"
not to mention Cezanne's pictorial doleance
with Pierrot figures
in the eighteen eighties and
Picasso's after the great war
And this give us
a large essence
of what Watteau was up
to Gilles
suggest
it was one of his paintings, Gilles
suggest a characteristic
modernist anxiety"
Now look what is happened
this caleidoscope
of different
interpretations of the painters
has come to
an interpretation
that reads Watteau
through the lens of
Cezanne and Picasso
and "Les enfants du paradis"
all of it. It isn't
that the critic
has discovered something
new about
the life of Watteau
or his time, so what was
on his mind
It isn't as if
one critic has seen something in the
picture that others
have missed
rather
what different
critic see in
the picture and why
Is itself
a subject for
interpretation
and I think it can only be
understood against
the background of something like the
responsibility theory
that I'm urgent upon you
that is
what has happened is that
from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century
from the frivolity to the
sober and then into
the twentieth and twenty first century
which is
preoccupied with the notion
of literature as an
expression of the modernist
Those changes in essence
are what would make the
poem great, have been
reflected, or the painting
what would made the painting great
have been reflected in distinct
senses of what the
painting is
Now very briefly
I want to
say a bit about
history. Because
history is an example
of a different
family of interpretation
interpretive genres
the explanatory
family
The great
in nineteenth
century pride
of British history was Macaulay
Macaulay in the first paragraph of one
of his famous book, he writes as follows
please, forgive the hubris:
"The history of our
country during the last
hundred and sixty years
is eminently the
history of physical
of moral and of intellectual development
This view
of what
the history of Britain in the last
hundred years
should be seen to embody
angered
Herbert Butterfield
who wrote a book called
"The whig theory of history"
and took Macaulay
to be the arch whig
"The whig historian
Butterfield wrote
can say that events
take on their due proportion
when observe through the labs of time
He can say that events
must be judged by their ultimate issues
which since we can
trace them no farther
we must at least follow
down to the present
He can say that it is only in relation
to the twentieth century
that one happening or
another in the past has
relevance or significance
for us
It is easy to see the fight
between Christianity and
paganism as a play of
forces and to discuss it
so to speak in the abstract
with one eye in our situation
but it is much
more illuminating to
watch it as the interplay of personalities
and people, much more
interesting if we can take the general
statement with which we began
and pursue it
in its concrete incidence
till we discover into what
manifold detail it
differentiates itself
It is along this line
that the historian carries
us truly and carries
us away from
the world of general ideas"
Of course a
Marxian historian writes
very differently
and a historian
who thinks
climate is the greatest
state of law and of the human invents
writes still differently
yet
And we cannot I
think understand
the different interpretive
that historians bring
to the interpretive pole
of their craft, not just
what happened when but
what meaning we should take from it
We cannot understand that
without understanding
the more basic deep
sense of what is
important for us now
and what happened to them then
I return though
I promised only briefly
to the subject with which
I began which is
law
to
repeat
the general lesson
I hope to take
from all of
this rumination
is a responsibility
theory of interpretation
We interpret
say a clause
in the Constitution
correctly
when we
acquit the
responsibility we
rightly identify
as the role of the interpretor
For example, a judge
or a justice
The interpretation
is therefore
interpretive
of the tradition in which
it interprets, its
interpretive as we might say
all the way
down
We are therefore
wrong to suppose
as we do in some
knowledge but not others
that there's no right answer
We must
explain the
scope and the
intractability of the
disagreements we have
and our judges have of what the law
is but we can't
explain it throught the
incoherence
of interpretive
scepticism. We
must explain it in the way I
tried to do
that is by pointing
to the very
elaborate, substructure
of any interpretive
approach hidden
typically from the interpretor
But so dense
and so ramified
into a thousand
other values
that the opportunity
we want to put it in that way
for disagreement is
endless. The
attempt to recapture
the
notable points of that
disagreement, I think
is a great project for
legal
philosophy
and legal history
We must avoid
therefore
at all times
the slander of the senate
judiciary committee hearing
in which
senators, some senators
suppose that
a law is easily discerned
and that anyone who
doesn't vote and a justice
who doesn't vote as the senator
wishes is making the
law up
imposing his own preferences
is that there is slander
Justices
are trying not
to make up the law
but to find
the law, they
disagree about what it is
but I believe
we can explain why they
disagree in a way
that doesn't rely on the
incoherent no-right-answer
basis. There is,
I think, some
practical bite
in this exercise
Many academic
lawyers and some
judges take a kind
of comfort from
the no-right-answer form
of specticism
The teacher in his classroom
says to the delight of the
law students: "There is much to be
said on both sides of this
issue, there's no right
answer"
The judge sometimes feels
I believe
that when he is reach the point at which
he has no more arguments
that will convince
he's reach the end of his
responsibility to
examine and that I think is
a mistake, a mistake he
must acknowledge
whence he
recognizes the theoretical
foundation on which
his instincts rest
Very few academic
lawyers and even fewer
judges have
the time in cogitation
or perhaps even capacity
for political
philosophy
But there
must be roam in every
career for
recognizing
the structure of opinion
of I described
and from time to
time in a core moment
from examining
and examining
critically that
ice mass that lies
beneath intuition
We must
not make the opposite mistake
that fevers what I called
the judiciary
committee slander
And that is the
mistake of thinking that in the
endless and algorithm
that law is really a science
than experts can
pursue and find
the right answer
Christopher Columbus Langdell
built a temple
to that mistaken idea
in Cambridge, Massachusets
but we must recognize his
idea as a mistake
Law is not literature
but law
is closer to poetry
than it is
to physics or
even sacrilege economics
Thank you very much
Thank you. Thank you so much
Thank you so much
Before we will
convene more informally across the
street in Madison hall for the reception
let me just
acknowledge three people for whom
there was no uncertainty
or scepticism
In terms of selecting
Ron Dworkin to be the inaugural
lecturer and recipient of
Fred R. and Molly S. Kellogg award
And they are Mark Medish
Don Wallace
and Dana Shetter who served
as the selectors
for the lecture. There were many many
nominations but clearly
uncertainty and scepticism
never entered into the process
And Ron Dworkin
with the clear choice for everyone
I would like to
again ask you to
acknowledge Molly and
Fred for this wonderful lecture
series and forgiving us
in ongoing forum to
address issues that we really have
have quiet utterance disciplinary frat
that run through them
Thank you for coming and thank you again
Molly and Fred
Please, join us if you are able
across the street for the reception