Thomas Jefferson, who was himself a lawyer and political philosopher, believed good lawyers had to have a broad knowledge base. He believed lawyers must read classics by the likes of Marcus Tullius Cicero and William Shakespeare in addition to William Blackstone’s legal treatises.
While Georgetown law professor
Robin West won’t go that far, she does believe the study of law should be much more attentive to its philosophical roots these days.
“With the Jeffersonian ideal, there were huge problems, because it was unbearably, insufferably elitist,” she says.
Nevertheless, the ideal that one ought to understand law in the culture that creates it seems obvious to West. “To sort of sharpen your critical and moral thinking about law, it seems to me indispensable to bring in cultural materials.”
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, West arrived at the University of Maryland School of Law in the 1970s as something of an "accidental law student" -- until she discovered that the law was merely the practical application of her undergraduate studies.
“Taking jurisprudence and rereading Jeremy Bentham’s
The Principles of Morals and Legislation, it became clear to me for the first time that he’s talking about what law should be,” West says. “He writes about it generally so that it also encompasses what individual persons should do, but he’s really talking about what the legislators should do … so it came alive for me in law school in a way that it had not in college.”
After a year of practice, West headed to Stanford University to obtain her master of science in law, which was packed with graduate courses in philosophy and writing. She later taught at the University of Maryland and Cleveland State University law schools and at Stanford University and the University of Chicago as a visiting professor before becoming a permanent Georgetown faculty member in 1992.
On July 1, she will become the newest associate dean for research and academic programs at the Law Center. As associate dean for research and academic programs, West will be responsible for matters concerning both faculty research and scholarship and for major issues of curriculum design and innovation.
Though honored to receive the appointment, West says she has found much enjoyment in the classes that she currently teaches -- which include a 15-student seminar on law and humanities last semester. She also teaches feminist legal theory, a legal justice seminar and first-year torts and contracts.
One-third of the law and humanities course is devoted to exploring books such as Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Toni Morrison’s
Beloved; Herman Melville’s
Billy Budd, Sailor and Susan Glaspell’s
A Jury of Her Peers; all of which are explored in a legal context.
While reading about life on the Mississippi may bear little resemblance to life as an associate in a fast-paced law firm, West says she doesn’t hear her students complaining about having to read fiction.
Jonathan Uffelman (L’08) says West’s teachings opened him up to a literary realm of law he didn’t know existed before taking two of her classes.
“I had no idea that was a field of study before I came to law school,” he says.
Uffelman, who plans to start work this fall at a Washington law firm, last year was introduced to West’s teachings in a yearlong seminar, Contemporary Legal Scholarship.
“Because she knows about everything that’s ever been written, she knew something about every topic that we chose to write about -- and there was a broad range,” he says.
He says it was that seminar that compelled him to sign up for last semester’s law and humanities course.
“What I try to do in the law and humanities course, as well as in my own writing, is to look at not only the particular laws of the time and how they form the backdrop of the action, but also what role the idea of legalism is playing in the lives of these characters,” West says.
Using Jim’s character in Huckleberry Finn as an example, she points to how laws of that time dictated treatment of the runaway slave as property.
“In the slave period, of course, the slaves were outside of law’s protection, but they were very much legally regulated, obviously, so it’s a kind of relation of law … that we don’t study very much.”
The goodness of law
In her own writing, she’s most recently explored the institution of marriage. In
Marriage, Sexuality, Gender (Paradigm, 2007) West suggests that states could retain their traditional marriage laws while adding a civil union option that could be entered into by any two people for the purpose of caring for themselves or themselves and their dependents, irrespective of gender or sexual relationship.
She’s currently writing a work called
Reconstructing Critical Jurisprudence, urging those in the field to examine how judgments are made about the value of law.
“It looks at the disappearance of the concept of good as a moral criterion of value in evaluating law … we look a lot at costs and benefits, we look at efficiency, we look at wealth … there’s not a lot of sustained inquiry into what the goodness of law is when it’s good, so that’s sort of the overall hope of the book,” she says.
West has eight books and more than 115 articles either completed or forthcoming.
“She writes books as easily as some write articles,” says professor
David Luban, who served on faculty with West at the University of Maryland during the late 1980s and early 1990s before they both wound up teaching at Georgetown.
Luban, who has known West as a colleague and friend for more than 20 years, refers to her as an “incredible scholar and mentor” with a great sense of humor.
“One of the astounding things about Robin is that she manages to think and write so prolifically while somehow making time for other things as well,” he says. “What’s abundantly clear is how much her ideas about caregiving could describe Robin herself. Somehow, she always has time to talk with students and colleagues about their lives and careers.”
Hannah Alejandro (L’08), who also took West’s seminar class last year, agrees with Luban.
“The most important things I’ve learned from Robin West are really lessons about how to live a life and build a professional identity that is based in self-awareness, compassion and a commitment to the dignity of all people,” she says. “Professor West has an incredible intellect, and by example she teaches that intelligence is hollow when it does not serve goodness.”
Last semester, West was installed as the Law Center’s newest Frederick J. Haas Chair in Law and Philosophy. As outgoing Haas Chair, Luban calls it a fitting honor for someone who has devoted her career to understanding the connection between the two not-so-disparate fields of law and philosophy.
“I’ve been interested in the relation of law and philosophy for a long, long time, and I’ve written a lot about it,” she says. “It’s an honor that’s in recognition of law and scholarship.”
Though West has a list of professional accomplishments, she says her family keeps her grounded. The week before her installation as Haas Chair, West was modest about her new title, remarking that her three children -- ages 18, 16 and 13 -- only laugh when she tries to explain it to them.
Her students view the accomplishments a bit differently.
“If Georgetown Law is the night’s sky and the professors are the stars,” Uffelman says, “Professor West is a particularly luminous one.”
