His formal affiliation to the Law School was still years away, but it was around this time that Nagel became part of what was dubbed the Tuesday Evening Club (though Kornhauser seems to recall it quirkily met on Thursday evenings). It consisted of a small group of law professors with a philosophical bent and philosophers from around the city, who would meet to discuss working papers at restaurants like Minetta Tavern. The NYU professors dominated in numbers and eventually the group started meeting at the University. The Tuesday Evening Club would turn out to be “sociologically important,” Kornhauser believes, as it brought together a community of people with like interests—and served as a kind of precursor to the colloquium. And as Sager relates in a bit of foreshadowing, it was the place where the law professors “got to know Nagel better and better.” All of that was prelude to the period around 1986-87, when a remarkable set of circumstances, followed by ingenious, problemsolving maneuvers, led to the school’s flourishing. Word came that Dworkin, who was splitting his residence between London, where he taught at Oxford University, and New York City, might be interested in immersing himself more in the American legal scene. “We jumped at the idea we might get Dworkin onboard,” Sager recalls. “We saw him as an extraordinary resource for us in our development as young scholars,” adds Richards. “Philosophical argument is extremely important in legal argument, particularly in constitutional interpretation—that was Larry Sager’s and my view.” The professors pushed to get Dworkin a more regular appointment (he would continue to teach at Oxford in the spring). The faculty wasn’t receptive, mainly because of the part-time deal. “There was a terrible problem getting it through the faculty at the time,” Richards recalls. “The arrangement was very anomalous because he wasn’t going to come full-time.” Kornhauser recalls how Dworkin then was a controversial figure. “I think people were envious actually, of his fame, the deal he seemed to be getting, the fact that he so obviously enjoys intellectual activity,” he says. While negotiations were underway with Dworkin and the faculty, Nagel got an offer from UCLA’s philosophy department. “Those of us who had been enjoying the virtues of having him around got very upset,” Sager recalls, recounting what happened next: “I turned to David Richards and Lewis Kornhauser and I said, ‘We’ve got to see if there’s anything we can do to stop this.’ There followed a blunt set of conversations with Tom, telling him how we valued him enormously.” The conversations led to the idea of getting Nagel an appointment to the Law School in addition to the philosophy department. Nagel notes that the potential link to the Law School and Dworkin “certainly consolidated my commitment to NYU.” Sager continues the story: “The three of us marched into the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. We said, ‘We don’t want to lose Tom, and you don’t either. We’re willing to fight at the Law School, and you have to stand behind it. You’ve got to line up 100 percent behind us.’” The University and the Law School did of course eventually agree to the appointments. Nearly two decades later, Sager still marvels at the academic unorthodoxy of it all—“namely, the halftime appointment of a person more legal philosopher than lawyer [Dworkin], plus someone who was a moral philosopher and not a Continued on page 32 lawyer at all [Nagel]!” AUTUMN 2005
who’s been in the hotseat? Since its inception in 1987, the Colloquium in Legal, Political and Social Philosophy has invited great thinkers from all over the world to expose their papers-in-progress to critique and debate. Half of the guests have been faculty from NYU, the others include: Elizabeth Anderson, University of Michigan
The late Carlos Nino, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Princeton University
The late Susan Moller Okin, Stanford University
Edwin Baker, University of Pennsylvania
Phillipe Van Parijs, Université Catholique de Louvain
Brian Barry, London School of Economics Seyla Benhabib, Yale University Akeel Bilgrami, Columbia University Michael Blake, Harvard University Stephen Breyer, United States Supreme Court John Broome, University of Oxford G.A. Cohen, University of Oxford Joshua Cohen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jules Coleman, Yale University The late Donald Davidson, University of California at Berkeley Cora Diamond, University of Virginia Robert C. Ellickson, Yale University John Elster, Columbia University The late John Hart Ely, University of Miami Richard Fallon, Harvard University
Philip Pettit, Princeton University Richard Posner, University of Chicago Robert Post, Yale University Jane Radin, Stanford University Peter Railton, University of Michigan Eric Rakowski, University of California at Berkeley The late John Rawls, Harvard University Joseph Raz, Columbia University John Roemer, Yale University Richard Rorty, Stanford University Gideon A. Rosen, Princeton University Lawrence Sager, University of Texas at Austin Michael Sandel, Harvard University T. M. Scanlon, Harvard University Frederick Schauer, Harvard University
John Finnis, University of Oxford
Samuel Scheffler, University of California at Berkeley
Owen Fiss, Yale University
Amartya Sen, Harvard University
Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University
Seana Shiffrin, University of California, Los Angeles
Barbara Fried, Stanford University Thomas Grey, Stanford University Klaus Guenther, Frankfurt University Amy Guttman, University of Pennsylvania Susan Haack, University of Miami Jürgen Habermas, Frankfurt University Thomas M. Hurka, University of Toronto, Canada Susan Hurley, University of Warwick, England Shelly Kagan, Yale University Frances Kamm, Harvard University Janos Kis, Central European University, Budapest Will Kymlicka, Queen’s University, Canada Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University Frank Michelman, Harvard University Martha Minow, Harvard University
John A. Simmons, University of Virginia Peter Singer, Princeton University Gopal Sreenivasan, University of Toronto Barry Stroud, University of California at Berkeley Charles Taylor, McGill University Judith Jarvis Thomson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Roberto Unger, Harvard University Jeremy Waldron, Columbia University Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study Robin West, Georgetown University David Wiggins, University of Oxford The late Bernard Williams, University of Oxford Susan Wolf, University of North Carolina
THE LAW SCHOOL
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