{"id":1871,"date":"2008-11-07T14:16:45","date_gmt":"2008-11-07T19:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/?p=1871"},"modified":"2008-11-10T16:09:13","modified_gmt":"2008-11-10T21:09:13","slug":"reading-the-law-with-philip-frickey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/2008\/11\/reading-the-law-with-philip-frickey\/","title":{"rendered":"Appreciating Our Professors: Reading the Law with Philip Frickey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The law school professor who most influenced me is Philip Frickey<\/a>. <\/span><\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t take a course with Professor Frickey until I was a third-year student, but his thinking began to influence me, indirectly, during my first year, in the half-semester Legislation course that the University of Minnesota required me to take in the spring. <\/span>My section of Legislation was taught by Jim Chen<\/a>, then (the 1995-96 school year) a relatively new law professor, and now Dean of the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. <\/span>Professor Chen led my small section of students through discussion of what it means to interpret a statute, guided by Professors Eskridge and Frickey\u2019s conception of the \u201cfunnel of abstraction<\/a>\u201d (the same funnel that now guides my own students in our discussions of how to interpret a statute).
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

To be honest, the Legislation course seemed tedious to me at the time, because the basic concepts–ambiguity as a threshold issue, the difficulty of discerning an \u201cintent\u201d to a group of individuals, the importance of context, the merits and problems with each of the available sources that can assist a court in agreeing upon a reasonable interpretation, Chevron deference, etc.\u2014were interesting, but relatively straightforward, and so the class felt repetitive to me. <\/span>I felt I\u2019d grasped the basic point of the course after a few hours of class. <\/span>But in retrospect, being forced to separately and carefully consider the difficulty of assigning meaning to legislative enactments informed my understanding of the law in an important and lasting way. <\/span>I am glad I had the course, and sometimes I think we should have a similar requirement at the Law School.<\/p>\n

Still, it was in the third-year course, American Indian Law, where Professor Frickey made the strongest impression on me. <\/span>That was my favorite law school course. <\/span>To begin with, the course was in effect a sort of review of the entirety of law school, combining threads of constitutional, statutory, and foreign law, in a complicated mix, and all in the context of a sort of \u201cothered\u201d people. <\/span>I was struck about how many similarities there were between the way the law operated in the context of American Indians and in the context of immigrants. <\/span>Words took on strange meanings, fundamental constitutional protections failed in the face of sovereign power. <\/span>The way Professor Frickey taught it, American Indian Law became a prism through which to consider what we mean when we talk about \u201cthe law\u201d and \u201clegal reasoning.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

One of the chief reasons that Professor Frickey\u2019s teaching in the course left such an impression is because the brute power at the bottom of the law is exposed in such contexts, when law is applied to people deemed \u201cthe other.\u201d <\/span>For instance, I will never forget the moment I read that powerful line in Johnson v M\u2019Intosh<\/em>: <\/span>\u201cConquest gives a title the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny.\u201d <\/span>It struck me like a physical blow. <\/span>I had to stop and reread it. <\/span>When I finished reading and rereading that opinion (and several others in the course), I was left uneasy, with the feeling that maybe the law was all a farce, window dressing. <\/span>Or the opposite, that it was extremely powerful, really a weapon of war, the strong arm of the conqueror.<\/p>\n

In class, Professor Frickey brought my thoughts back down to earth, back into the arguments in the cases, picking them apart, line by line, thought by thought. <\/span>He took all of the arguments, even the most outrageous, seriously, and in this way he insisted that legal reasoning was real and did matter, and insisted that we students treat it the same way, articulating specific criticisms or supports for the cases\u2019 reasoning, rather than expressing mere outrage or approval. <\/span><\/p>\n

I try to do the same in my classroom, and I would be pleased if, at least some of the time, I accomplish it half as well as Professor Frickey did in that course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The law school professor who most influenced me is Philip Frickey. I didn\u2019t take a course with Professor Frickey until I was a third-year student, but his thinking began to influence me, indirectly, during my first year, in the half-semester Legislation course that the University of Minnesota required me to take in the spring. My […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ocean_post_layout":"","ocean_both_sidebars_style":"","ocean_both_sidebars_content_width":0,"ocean_both_sidebars_sidebars_width":0,"ocean_sidebar":"","ocean_second_sidebar":"","ocean_disable_margins":"enable","ocean_add_body_class":"","ocean_shortcode_before_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_after_top_bar":"","ocean_shortcode_before_header":"","ocean_shortcode_after_header":"","ocean_has_shortcode":"","ocean_shortcode_after_title":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_widgets":"","ocean_shortcode_before_footer_bottom":"","ocean_shortcode_after_footer_bottom":"","ocean_display_top_bar":"default","ocean_display_header":"default","ocean_header_style":"","ocean_center_header_left_menu":"","ocean_custom_header_template":"","ocean_custom_logo":0,"ocean_custom_retina_logo":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_width":0,"ocean_custom_logo_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_tablet_max_height":0,"ocean_custom_logo_mobile_max_height":0,"ocean_header_custom_menu":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_family":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_subset":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_size":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_font_size_unit":"px","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_font_weight_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_tablet":"","ocean_menu_typo_transform_mobile":"","ocean_menu_typo_line_height":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_line_height_unit":"","ocean_menu_typo_spacing":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_tablet":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_mobile":0,"ocean_menu_typo_spacing_unit":"","ocean_menu_link_color":"","ocean_menu_link_color_hover":"","ocean_menu_link_color_active":"","ocean_menu_link_background":"","ocean_menu_link_hover_background":"","ocean_menu_link_active_background":"","ocean_menu_social_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_bg":"","ocean_menu_social_links_color":"","ocean_menu_social_hover_links_color":"","ocean_disable_title":"default","ocean_disable_heading":"default","ocean_post_title":"","ocean_post_subheading":"","ocean_post_title_style":"","ocean_post_title_background_color":"","ocean_post_title_background":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_image_position":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_attachment":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_repeat":"","ocean_post_title_bg_image_size":"","ocean_post_title_height":0,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay":0.5,"ocean_post_title_bg_overlay_color":"","ocean_disable_breadcrumbs":"default","ocean_breadcrumbs_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_separator_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_color":"","ocean_breadcrumbs_links_hover_color":"","ocean_display_footer_widgets":"default","ocean_display_footer_bottom":"default","ocean_custom_footer_template":"","ocean_post_oembed":"","ocean_post_self_hosted_media":"","ocean_post_video_embed":"","ocean_link_format":"","ocean_link_format_target":"self","ocean_quote_format":"","ocean_quote_format_link":"post","ocean_gallery_link_images":"on","ocean_gallery_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-legal-education","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}