The import of the two hires was huge, if perhaps not fully realized at the time. “In effect,” says Sager, “the NYU School of Law was saying, ‘We’re not just going to reach out and have wonderful relations with the philosophy department or the economics department—we’re going to install philosophers of the first rank in the Law School.’ We were reproducing the resources of an elite university inside a law school—that’s a pretty remarkable idea.” “The Law School would become a mini-university and this seemed a very good way of making NYU, in a very short time, a major law school—perhaps the major American law school,” says Richards.
THE BEST SHOW IN TOWN
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o be asked to present a paper at the colloquium, suggests Frances Kamm, reaching for a metaphor, “is to be asked by the Metropolitan Opera to come and sing in its venue.” Except it’s probably fair to say that the audience at the colloquium is even more merciless and demanding than the folks who go to Lincoln Center. The colloquium started soon after Dworkin and Nagel got their appointments, and almost as quickly was dubbed “The Tom and Ronnie Show.” The idea was to bring in distinguished speakers (half from the NYU School of Law) who would present papers weekly over 14 weeks in moral, political and legal theory, and then be sub-
Feminism as Philosophy Holding a B.A. and law degree from Yale, Professor Amy Adler isn’t a philosopher but says, “Philosophy figures into my work,” which focuses on sexuality and free speech in art and culture. “Feminist jurisprudence has a lot to say about sexual expression and how the law grapples with those particularly anxiety-ridden cultural conflicts. It’s densely philosophical.” In her upcoming NYU Law Review article “Girls! Girls! Girls! The Supreme Court Confronts the G-String,” for example, she asks whether the Court, in its decision to require nude dancers to wear a G-string, can consider a woman’s nude body speech for First Amendment purposes. In “The Female Body Speaks,” another Law Review article that is still in draft form, Adler suggests that the very notion of free speech in the Constitution is gender biased. “How do we determine what’s speech and what isn’t?” Adler asks. The First Amendment, she argues, views the masculine ideas as speech but discounts more feminine emotions and things related to the body. “Our preferences for speech over action, mind over body, ideas over emotion, text over image, which are embedded in our interpretation of the Constitution, all have a hidden gender component.” A true interdisciplinarian, Adler draws from literature, Freudian analysis, cultural theory and art. In her Art Law course, she explores a variety of First Amendment issues as they relate to art—hate speech, government funded art and pornography. To a lesser extent, the class also covers intellectual property in art and problems of the art market such as looted art and authenticity disputes, as well as theoretical questions regarding public art. For example, in the court’s 1985 decision to remove artist Richard Serra’s sculpture Tilted Arc from Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, sparked by protests that it was blocking pedestrian traffic, where does the court draw the line between the rights of the public and those of the artist?
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THE LAW SCHOOL
jected to challenge and questioning from perhaps 40 or 50 faculty and students. In addition, the colloquium was a for-credit class for about 20 upper-year students who met with Dworkin separately for two hours a week to discuss and write about the same papers that were presented at the colloquium. But that brochure-like description hardly does it justice. Dworkin’s and Nagel’s reputations are such that they are able to persuade the biggest names in that field to come. A few: John Rawls, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Michael Walzer, Amartya Sen, Jeremy Waldron, Stephen Breyer, Lawrence Lessig, Jürgen Habermas. As a result of those stars—and the awe-provoking ability of Dworkin and Nagel to elicit the highest level of discussion—the colloquium, and the Law School itself, became the hottest ticket in legal and moral philosophy. Faculty and students from a number of universities in the greater New York area cram into standing-room-only classrooms. As Richards puts it, it is “the best show in town.” Liam Murphy remembers being wide-eyed attending colloquia as a visitor while he was in a doctoral program at Columbia in the mid-1980s. “The first time I went, there were three of the most famous philosophers in the world—Dworkin, Bernard Williams and Tom Nagel. They were like celebrities for somebody like me who was a beginning graduate student in philosophy.” For the speaker invited to present, it was, as Kamm noted, a rarified honor—that is, if you didn’t mind being exposed intellectually in a grueling daylong event. Kamm, who taught at New York University from 1979 until 2003, when she moved to the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the department of philosophy at Harvard, remembers the details with irrepressible enthusiasm. “It would start at 11:30 in Ronnie’s office for a half hour; we’d chat a bit and then go to lunch, usually at a French restaurant in SoHo,” relates Kamm, who presented papers four times in the 1990s. For some three hours Dworkin and Nagel would discuss her paper to make sure they understood its ramifications and prep her on possible questions. “This method of advanced preparation guaranteed the discussion did not go off the rails,” says Nagel. And unlike at most lectures, Dworkin or Nagel, rather than the author, presents a summary of the paper, to keep the presentation and subsequent discussion focused, briefer—and to ensure that any weak points are exposed for the audience. (“The tradition of philosophy is the philosopher reads his paper, which is deadly and I think foolish,” notes Kornhauser. “On average, someone else is a better presenter of another’s paper.”) The lunch would be grueling—and the colloquium would not have even started yet. “I always thought, as I would leave that restaurant walking between them, if only there was a place of prayer I could go before I went in, because it was going to be a disaster!” Kamm said, laughing a little. The colloquium itself lasts from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m., followed by dinner. Now would she be able to relax? Nope, she would be grilled yet again—until around 9:00 p.m. “The intensity of it!” Kamm exclaims. “You’re not allowed to slack around dinner and just chitchat. This is a serious matter and you’re not let off the hook.” Kamm isn’t complaining: “The level of discussion is incomparable. You’re getting two of the best philosophers in the world running this operation.” And two different ways of thinking, notes Mattias Kumm, who presented papers twice (in 2001, on the Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict, and in 2003, on Constitutional Democracy and the Enforcement of Supranational Law by National Courts). AUTUMN 2005