Last week Princeton University's LAPA program and library hosted a conference on critical legal studies in, as I would put it, historical perspective. (There is of course something a bit odd about finding oneself to be an object of historical inquiry.) I'm still digesting what was said, but here are some preliminary, mostly unconnected observations.

1. In what sense, other than as an organization, is CLS dead? One younger participant suggested that it wasn't dead at all, because it lived on in scattered "sleeper cells" ready to emerge when circumstances become favorable. I had been circling around a similar metaphor. In the late 1960s the underground newspaper in Cambridge was called the "Old Mole." The name was taken from a phrase from Marx (channeling Shakespeare), referring to a mole that had been burrowing underground for years, to come out into the light and be greeted, "Well grubbed, Old Mole."

2. I was struck at the conference, as I have been in the past, at the central role the common law curriculum played in the development of CLS. One reason, pointed out to me by Willy Forbath, was that first year students were targets of opportunity for early CLS teachers -- or, put another way, CLS as an organizing technique had to meet its audience where it was. I think there might have been another reason -- the common law curriculum deals with private law, and private law is at the heart of liberal legalism. In liberal legal ideology public law serves to insulate the private domain -- itself defined through private law -- from public intrusion/regulation. To the extent that I see myself as having made a contribution to core CLS ideas, I see that contribution as being the demonstration that the contours of public law were defined reciprocally with those of public law -- or, put another way, that the CLS critique of private law had to include some input from (a critical analysis of) public law.

3. Perhaps not surprisingly, there were interesting echoes of past "concerns" about the political valence of CLS. In its first iteration the concern was (roughly), "Here we liberal legalists are fighting off the threat of Reaganite conservatism, and you folks are arguing that the ground on which we are attempting to stand is made of sand." In its current iteration one simply substitutes Trump and a much more intense concern about what's at stake, for Reagan. The task for progressives, it was and is said, is the retrieval rather than the critique of liberal legalism.

I was taken by the response offered by one of the speakers, perhaps Gary Peller, that what we are facing is the possibility of an authoritarian liberal legalism, embodied in the person of John Roberts. (In my forthcoming book I allude to this problem by characterizing liberals as thinking of John Roberts as Obi-Wan Kenobi, our only hope.) My exemplary opinion is Roberts's "Muslim ban" opinion with its distinction between "this [racist] President" and "the presidency [to be occupied serially by other marginally less blatantly racist presidents]." One project that a younger person with CLS-like leanings might profitably engage in, I think, would be the elaboration of what authoritarian liberal legalism would look like. (That elaboration would have to take into account the CLS view that "ordinary" liberal legal liberalism was itself authoritarian.)