Spring is rumored to be in the air, but in the legal academy and in general it isn’t always the happiest and most optimistic of times. T. S. Eliot offered the following lines in the The Waste Land:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
In response to the Blog editor’s call for discussions of law review articles that have influenced our work as academics, I offer a few words on Karl Llewellyn’s “A Realistic Jurisprudence – The Next Step,” 30 Columbia Law Review 431 (1930). Llewellyn’s words are often cited as the first important salvo of the legal realist movement, and the article has influenced my own teaching and writing in virtually every subject area I’ve tackled.
Llewellyn begins by asserting that “law” is one of our “loosest of suggestive symbols.” “Law” ranges in his mind from such simple forms as statutes and appellate holdings to a range of socio-cultural control devices and institutions. “I have no desire to exclude anything from matters legal,” Llewellyn says. “I am not going to attempt a definition of “law. Not anybody’s definition; much less my own.”
However, Llewellyn then goes on in the bulk of the article to emphasize a particular “focus” or “point of reference.”
It’s unusual for a law review in one state to devote an issue to a decision from the supreme court of another state, but that’s exactly what happened when the Western New England Law Review published a 2004 symposium issue concerning State v. Oakley, 629 N.W.2d 200 (Wis. 2001). I personally welcome the opportunity to teach and, in the process, critique the decision.
The case involved David Oakley, who fathered nine children with four women and was impossibly behind on his child support payments. Manitowoc County Circuit Court Judge Fred Hazlewood placed Oakley on probation following his conviction for refusing to support his children. However, the probation was conditioned on Oakley having no more children until he could support the ones he already had. A four-judge majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court confirmed Hazlewood’s order.
Commentators predictably discussed the decision’s ramifications for the right to procreate and the larger right to privacy.