2001
Law Professor
I'll always remember how the late American author Reynolds Price, who taught at Duke for decades in the English Department and was always an outsize presence in the Allen Building, responded to my request for a law school letter of recommendation: "Ah, you're going to the Lizard Academy?" I can't quite tell you the precise combination of irony and sincerity with which the quip was delivered. With a couple decades of hindsight, I can tell you that, my new scaliness notwithstanding, the decision has worked out for me. (Like Dr. Price, I became a university professor, which perhaps gives me some distance from some of the darker arts of lizardry that he might have been imagining). A study of literature, if undertaken seriously, is one of the best preparations for a legal career because it requires you to attend to language and text carefully. And language is the raw material out of which both law and literature are made. Close, detailed reading of text, along with contextual analysis, is the central skill of both disciplines. But textual analysis is not enough; lawyers also need to explain their analysis effectively -- to judges, the public, scholars, juries, etc. Alongside textual analysis, exposition and composition are of equal importance. Hence my continued faith in the liberal arts in general, and English Departments in particular. Even as AI routinizes and automates simpler language tasks, it will become all the more necessary for good writers -- good moulders of human language, whether in contracts or novels, legal briefs or literary criticism -- to distinguish themselves, not to mention the species.
https://law.gsu.edu/profile/robert-weber/
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=517246
