Hi, welcome to SOAS. You've joined us at an exciting time in the development of the School of Law. You would have walked past the building site outside where Senate House, where the School of Law will be housed in 2015. The faculty is growing, we've added more than a quarter of numbers to the academic staff in the last 18 months. And with them has come the excitement and dynamism we always get from new blood coming into a department. This is the fourth conference we've had this week and it's part of our new policy of going out there and putting things on and telling people about what the School of Law's doing. And when Nimmer came to me with the idea for today's conference I was absolutely delighted because there's no greater moment for radical scholarship to be celebrated. We live in a world where we're told about the value for money, we're told about the value of research, we're told about the value of employability, we're told about value added. Well, maybe. But we're tripping silently into a wild in a nightmare where we know the price of everything, or at least Vice-Chance's know the price of everything and the value of absolutely nothing. And therefore, in law, it's particularly vulnerable. We're seen as a vocational subject. We're seen as something which is owned by the professions where the professions tell us what they want. The latest incarnation of that is, of course, the legal education and training review, the move from knowledge-based to outcome-based requirements. And that might be wonderful, that might be good, that might be an opportunity. But I took from it this quote because I think it's chilling and I think it sums up what today is not about. It says in that report that an outcome-based qualifying law degree would be more effective for delivering interns who are training ready. I had to write that down because I kept remembering the quote as compliant, but I think that sums it up. That's exactly what Duncan Kennedy is not about. It's exactly why we enter the legal academia is not produce compliant creatures of the professions. Now, at this point, I'm meant to give you a quick biog, usually cloyingly laudatory, long and detailed, short on interest. I'm not gonna embarrass Duncan with that or bore you with it. You're here, that's everything about how much we value his scholarship and how much we value the fact he came to us today. And at that point, I'd like to simply welcome Duncan Kennedy. 30 minutes or 30 minutes or so. Costas will respond for... 25 minutes or so, and then we'll have an open conversation, even if I have to push Costas off the podium. I don't think either Duncan or Costas really need much of an introduction. I was a bit curious when I was asked to moderate this because I was thinking, what kind of conversation am I gonna be talking about? I was thinking, what kind of conversation am I gonna be moderating? Is this gonna be a no-hold-barred battle between the two major figures on each side of the Atlantic of the critical leftist legal traditions? And of course, they are quite distinct traditions in many ways, so there is perhaps opening for an interesting conversation between the American-style critical legal studies with its roots in 19th century pragmatism and early 20th century legal realism and the continental-style critical legal studies with its roots in Kant-Hagel and more recent continental philosophy. So I was thinking there might be an interesting conversation there between the two traditions, but actually, on reflection, I started thinking, well, actually, they're far too erudite, the two of them, they know each other for far too long for that necessarily to be the beginning and the end of the conversation. So I think actually what we'll end up with is quite an engaging, hopefully a longer, more enduring conversation about the topic of Duncan's talk, which is the relationship between left politics and left legal theory. So that's all I think I wanted to open out with. I think if we don't have an argument, we'll obviously have to try and provoke one, but I'll make you start off, Duncan. Okay. So let me see, can you hear me if I speak at this level? Can you hear me in the back? It's an incredible pleasure to be here and I'm a little shocked at how happy it makes me. I think something may be off. So the past, the past and future of the left, I'm here to represent the past unequivocally and that's what I'm gonna do. I am gonna actually represent the past, present a version of the past of American critical legal studies in the way that I did it. So it's not about American critical legal studies generically anymore than cost us can speak for British critical legal studies. We're both in the position of eccentrics, even within the tendency that we have helped to build and organize. Which is a- It's a dominant tendency. I would say- I would say. If not the dominant tendency, in my case, the surviving tendency. It's about all we could say about it. Because there are very few people left in American legal academia who would ever describe themselves as crits. Can you hear me now as I move away from the microphone? Is it still audible? You can't hear me. Some say yes, some say no. I'd much rather speak without the microphone like this if you can't hear me. No, okay, it won't. Sorry, posterity requires me to speak from the microphone.  As I said, nobody in the US today, practically, very few people would describe themselves as crits. There are many people who were once crits. What did you do in the 30s? Would be the kind of, in the generation before mine that people asked, and it turned out lots and lots of people were communists or anarchists. But by the 1950s, they were very, very few on the ground and a large number of them were CIA or FBI agents as a matter of fact. So the situation of critical legal studies is that in the United States, it's gone, but it actually has a fairly powerful, fairly real continuing background presence. There are many, many people who've absorbed tons of stuff from it and it's in a sense a part of a common interdisciplinary mishmash of things that can be combined more or less randomly while you write your piece for tenure. So it's still there. It's a little degraded. As a form, it's a little degraded to be reduced to one of the tendencies of interdisciplinarity. But that's all I'm going to say for the moment about critical legal studies. I want to start by saying something about my topic. So I am going to try to talk about left practice in relation to left theory. And I'm going to try to do it in a somewhat odd way. So I'm going to begin by talking about some of my experiences of left practice and the ways in which they put pressure on the kinds of left theory that seem plausible to me. So I'm going to do this from the ground up. Typically American boring American stuff always has to start from the case and so forth. And I'm going to do that. So let me begin by two practices. So I want to emphasize that what I'm going to be describing is modest, not very successful, earnestly pursued, good left projects. And I have no sense that I myself was a leader in the projects I'm about to describe. I'll say something about critical legal studies later. But these are aspects of daily life that have been incredibly important to me during my legal past of the legal left. So the first is landlord-tenant work. So for many years, starting in the late 70s, I participated in various projects based in Harvard University in its clinical program but allied with the nationally funded legal services organization for poor people in trying to figure out how a clinic that served low-income tenants could do more than just defend them from eviction. The question was whether a clinic that had, say, 15 students and four paralegals and four lawyers had therefore had a significant caseload in a low-income neighborhood where many, for example, single women on welfare lived with their three children in a two-bedroom flat where there were rats and there was a persistent sewage smell because the plumbing never really was fully modernized after the tenement was built in 1895. Something could be done about those conditions. The idea was very straightforwardly to try to do targeted litigation. So this is something that's been tried in a million places by a million people in different ones. I just happened to participate in a particular Boston, Massachusetts version of this kind of experiment where the idea was could we single out the worst landlords and try to crash them by inundating them with defenses when they tried to evict people and then countersuing them. That very quickly raised the question of how to understand the economics of the neighborhood. And there, when we started, the neighborhood was in decline. And this strategy had very limited usefulness because it provoked abandonment. Then the neighborhood started to gentrify and the strategy suddenly became extremely plausible because the landlords wanted one way or another either to control the premises or to be able to modernize them and by blocking them in their gentrification if we could extract some rent for the tenants, either a lot of money to relocate or a commitment to fixing up the apartment without raising the rent by blocking the conversion of other units. So here is a practice connected up to a problem of how to theorize the practice in terms of the economic context of the neighborhood. So that's my first example. By the way, just when I need to add to that, the category property, commodity, and contract were useless in this endeavor. So it was immediately obvious that in so much as the commodity or property or contract were crucial categories of capitalist law, absolutely, but they had no bite because there were so many variants of capitalist law on the premises with so many overlapping legal regimes that if you thought you could reason from property either to know what was going to happen or what you should do, you just couldn't. So the basic idea was here, a legal realist idea, the infinite diversity of legal regimes that are consistent with an abstract concept like property became very important. This is an introduction to the indeterminacy issue. So the basic idea was capitalism doesn't determine landlord-tenant law, except in the vaguest and most general way. If you want to be a lawyer, you have to understand that because that's how you invent things. You invent things based on the non-determinative character of the legal concepts that you're dealing with. So here's the second one. I've spent quite a bit of time in the last 10 years working on Israel-Palestine legal issues in the US. Nothing like working on them here. There's no resemblance to that. Whatever. There, that appealed to me in part because the situation of the Palestinians in the particular way in which the Israeli state had constructed the regime that oppresses them was something that was largely invisible to American liberal or progressive public opinion. So it was just a silenced dimension of a situation of very serious oppression. And it was very interesting to get involved in it, thinking I could use some of the same legal skills capacities that have been involved in landlord-tenant. Other end of the spectrum on one level from a poor neighborhood to a regime, an occupation regime, but also the internal legal regime in Israel-Palestine. So there the experience was, I'm just going to say, my triumphant moment was a year and a half ago, my colleague Ellen Dershowitz, a very serious, deeply pro-Zionist fanatical professor at Harvard, received an honorary degree at the University of Tel Aviv, and used 10 minutes to denounce me personally for the evil betrayal of the principle of academic freedom and neutrality in my work. That's all I have to offer. I mean, that's the single big accomplishment of this particular effort in the American context. But I actually felt it really didn't make me feel good. So here I just want to make it an analogous point, a quick analogous point. The equivalent of the problem of property for understanding landlord-tenant law is the concept of sovereignty for understanding Israel-Palestine legal issues. So there the basic equivalent would be this. It's all very well to say there should be a sovereign state, one state, or sovereign two states. But the category of sovereignty is itself so indeterminate. It's so much a matter of spectra alternative and different bundles of entitlements that you get nowhere by saying to yourself, that's not good because it's not sovereignty, or that's good because it is sovereignty. For example, you could characterize the current situation as a one state solution for the occupied territories because the level of actual formal juristic integration of the territories of the West Bank with Israel proper makes it plausible to say that there's been full annexation and there's a single sovereign. So if you want a one state solution, you have to say more than a one state solution. You have to say what kind of a one state solution. And it will be on a spectrum with the current two state solution, which is Gaza. So in Gaza, in relation to Israel proper, there is a two state solution. There is certainly nothing like full occupation, but it would be crazy to say that it's sovereignty. So whatever the solution is going to be, not one state, not two states understood as just guaranteeing sovereignty to anybody, it's got to be an infinitely more complicated rejiggling of the different bundles of entitlements that we think of as going into state power. And here, I'd say exactly the same thing. The indeterminacy of the category sovereignty is a source of power for people doing left analysis. Of course, anybody can use it once it's mastered. But good left strategies, according to me, has to start from some idea of the fundamental indeterminacy of what concepts that are often treated as plausible basis for doctrinal reasoning and for programmatic thinking. Now out of that practice, I got into courses. So I spent a lot of my time just as a teacher of not very popular courses on housing law and policy and not very popular courses on Israel-Palestine legal issues. This is a form of left practice in my own mind. Again, this is not a grandiose presentation. It's not that I actually filled, I never had in either course, one tenth of the number, no, 20% of the number of people in this room. So the largest possible draw in an open enrollment situation is between 20 and 30, 35 people. And I was very glad to get them out of a student body of 1,800. So we're not talking about taking the academic ramparts by storm, to put it mildly. But the idea was this practice was to produce an academic treatment in which the legal issues in landlord-tenant law and the legal issues in Israel-Palestine could be laid out in a relatively systematic way, incorporating the idea of the insights about the indeterminacy of the fundamental concepts that everybody wanted to use with very concrete historical, sociological exposition of the context, which would, I hoped, change students' minds. So this is a left practice that's attempted to convert students to a radical left understanding of the depths of oppression generated by the regime by the incredibly elaborate development of the regime as a legal regime in an historical context. That was part of another left practice. And again, this left practice was a complete failure on the political level, which was the attempt to have a serious radicalizing effect on my own faculty. So I'm just going along step by step here. This was critical legal studies at Harvard Law School. There was also critical legal studies nationally. I'm going to say a word about both. At Harvard Law School, here the idea of left practice means oppositionism. In the landlord-tenant context, it meant challenging the landlords. In Israel-Palestine, it meant challenging the Zionist narrative. In this context, it meant challenging our colleagues fairly directly on a series of issues that ranged from a general critique of the culture, because this is a 68-ish movement. The culture was authoritarian, relatively rigid, super straight, dead as a doornail in terms of sexiness and intensity, enormously cooled out, deeply consensus-based, based on the idea of a genuine social community where everybody had dinner parties. And I'm afraid we destroyed it, which many of our colleagues never forgave us for. They lived in a nice world, and we came along. All these pseudo hippie but not really meritocrats like themselves. And we basically kept saying, no, no, no, no. We don't want to play the game. It's really just not a nice game for us as colleagues. But then for the students, it was terrible. It was a form of induction into a kind of passivity in relationship to the system that was characterologically instilled. It was a very powerful socializing process. Then there was the critique of what was taught. So there just wasn't enough poverty law in the curriculum. There wasn't enough anything that actually fed left causes. So the idea was a specific one. The curriculum should have courses which will expose students to the possibility of a serious critique of the status quo. And then there were appointments. So we had a million violent battles about who should be appointed. Those were the worst in normal academic politics way. The most bitter ones were actually when people were denied tenure. And that began to happen. So we had basically about 10 years. We had a slow mounting of the left faction of the faculty which expanded. But we weren't trying to see state power at all. We just wanted sufficient influence so that they would have to bargain with us. So again, these are the micro-tactics of the past of the legal left in American legal academic institutions. So the goal was, could we get to a point where the votes where we could veto an appointment and force them to deal with us to make an appointment? And about I can remember the date. Sometime in the middle of 1981, we vetoed an appointment. And we got a deal six months later. And one of us was appointed. This was the goal was power in the institutional system for the left. We called ourselves the left faction. So there was no ambiguity about that. And we made it completely clear what our agenda was, that it was not to take control of anything. But we totally freaked them out. We genuinely freaked out our colleagues on a level that caused eventually a kind of spillover into the bar. And a significant part of the alumni began to campaign to get rid of us. They clearly felt we were devaluing the market value of their degrees, because Harvard Law School was in the newspaper. And it no longer was a pure gold credential. Now it was associated with scandalous doings. And then a kind of combination, a right emerge, which was financed by members of the bar. And they crushed us like bugs. So I mean, these things happen. It was a great run while it lasted. They crushed us by denying tenure to left assistant professors. So that's how they did it. And that squelched the movement completely, because the movement was dependent on the idea that you could let us recruit you. And it was not a death sentence. So it became clear that association with us was dangerous.  I've got to see what time it is. The national movement was an experience of, what time did I start? 13 minutes ago. Thank you so much. No, no, no, 13 minutes, boss. That's good. So the thing about the national movement was it was deeply associated, and this was true at Harvard itself. It was associated everywhere with the arrival of women and people of color into legal academia plus the shutting down of graduate schools and sociology, political science, and history that it had radical degree programs. So that was for the white men. So the white men who had a choice go to law school or drive a cab in Cambridge. And many of them chose to go to law school rather than driving a cab, though not a small number of them actually did end up driving cabs. So the weird, unholy alliance was this. The number of law professors was expanding incredibly quickly. It just about doubled over a period of 15 years, and then it stopped growing after 1990, and critical legal studies came to an end about that time, too. Enormous new, this is the material base of a social movement. Jobs provided by the expansion of legal education means they have to hire a million people, and the standards begin to loosen, and affirmative action has become a part of the cultural norm for the liberal mainstream. So they're hiring all these white men who wanted to be radical sociology professors, but no longer can even get into graduate school, let alone get a job if they get their PhD. And lots of women and people of color are joining the faculties. So this was a great opportunity to make trouble, because the women often experienced their first shock of the cultural life of the old boy, guy, club, law faculties really made a lot of them mad in the mode of American feminism as it moved from the 70s into 80s. And they were totally serious. They were completely willing to be serious activists. The people of color were much more terrified as well they might have been, and had much less easy cultural access to the milieu that they were entering, but they were also just stunned at the basic sort of racial blankness at best and implicit bias at worst of the faculty that they joined. So we created a coalition. And the coalition eventually began to shatter when all these young people became more established and they got tenure, then the coalition of identity politics didn't fully outlast our success. But it lasted for a long time. And at the moment when the repression came down, now I just have to say I want to do a whine for a minute as a white male hegemon. A very large part of the oppression, repression, was aimed at us. Us white male guys were much easier to fire because it didn't raise any federal employment law issues with one or two exceptions. So we really took it on the nose, but everybody was discouraged. So everybody was discouraged nationally. So that's an example. These are all examples of left activist ventures at different levels. Now I want to say a word about what you might call the theory battle. So this what I've been describing so far has been a very important part of my life, which is organizing and being organized. So I was organized in the landlord tenant thing by Gary Bellow and Gene Charne, who were deep friends of mine, who became my deep allies. But I was their slave and their servant, which I wanted to be because they were amazing strategists figuring out how to do this. In the Israel-Palestine context, it was actually, now it was all of the basic people were Yishai Blank, Henni Syed, Amrishala Kani, Ra'af, a strike, and then Nimr, Roy Kreitner. So both Palestinians and Israeli Jews, Lema Abouda, I should mention, a very significant group of people who influenced my politics as an activist at every point. And I don't think it's possible to do it without some network sense, without some sense of people you trust, people you like, people you'll go with, people who it seems worth taking minor risks out tenure at Harvard Law School, minor risks for like that. So that was a very important part of it. But what about the theory? So the theory idea is the same. To me, left theory means theory. It's not, I'm so right, why doesn't anyone recognize it? Or we've always been right, we're still right, about time someone recognized it. My idea of left theory is you guys are wrong and you have a lot of influence on these people who you're snookering.  So this is a different conception than the idea of left theory as a self-contained, long genealogical tradition, which we develop internally, making it better over time. This is a much more combative idea of what left theoretical projects are. And they have critique in the strong sense, meaning not the critical tradition, but attacking the enemy. So the first enemy of this theoretical practice was moderate, center-left American liberalism in legal education, which was very different from Britain. It was policy-based. And our basic argument was that our colleagues had basically took for granted the legitimacy of a status quo, whose legitimacy was vastly reinforced, not by legal formalism, but by their middle of the road good judgment-based policy analysis. So we were attacking good judgment on the grounds that this is a classic attack on common sense that Kostas and I share the history of Gramsci's attack on common sense. So the common sense, we were attacking the common sense, then it was neoliberalism. So first it was common sense, and then it was neoliberalism. So since Reagan's election about, by the way, Reagan once gave a speech to an American organization called the Federalist Society of Right-wing Lawyers, in which he denounced us. So this is equivalent of Alan Dershowitz's denunciation at Tel Aviv. Unbelievable thrill for us marginals. Ronald Reagan gave you this speech, and he said, and you have contributed to marginalizing and destroying critical legal studies, a great service that you have made to the American lawyers. It was like 30 seconds, and we showed it like 100 times on a loop at a critical legal studies conference. He was really good, I must say. He sounded as though he'd heard of it. So the first target was common sense. The second target was neoliberalism. That involved, has involved fairly concretely detailed attempts to answer, for example, classic neoliberal economic arguments which justify neoliberal economic policies, both at the landlord-tenant level and at the level of international development. So this is also another course devised with David Kennedy, who can teach us here, which we created together called Law and Development. The course is basically a critique of mainstream development theory. That's what the course is. It's all about that. So mainstream development theory is presented in some detail, and to do well, you have to be able to critique it in some detail. You have to be able to say, how would you critique a marcheson? How would you critique Stiglitz? How would you create Roderick? You have to have an actual set of arguments about what's wrong with them. So that's a very basic ideological activity, which is part of what I mean by left theory. I'm going to do well. How many minutes? You have another half hour. I wouldn't take it from you. I would never dream of stealing from you the moments to come. So now theory, theory, matt's humiliating characterization of us as a continental, non-continental. We're not continental, we're non-continental. American legal realism and late 19th century pragmatism with a shameful theory suitcase to drag, roll on, that we drag behind us onto the plane to come to Europe to worship the genre. No. First of all, both American pragmatism and American legalism are part of European legal thought and philosophy. So these guys, the pragmatists, are all studied Hegel in Germany when the British thought he was at best a plumber. And there, American pragmatism is a response to Hegelian social theory, actually. Hegelian philosophy. And American legalism is directly an appropriation of some things that never really made it here, namely, the lineage that goes from Rinald Van Eyring to Francois Chigny, Raymond Salais, and Rene Dumont. So the Americans. They spoke French. We didn't. So that was an interesting question. That is a big question. So we think that our theory tradition is infinitely more steeped in what was useful about continental critical thought than the British tradition ever was, not counting, however, what happened when the sun rose over Costas. So we don't see it that way, in other words. And then during this time, we, American priests, were just desperately theory course. I mean, we were basically going for anything that was published in Europe. We were just scarfing it up. We had a Marx study group, a Derrida study group, several Foucault study groups. So the thing that, in your imagination, is a confrontation. It's actually a confrontation of different ways of dealing with this continental philosophical tradition as it's brought to bear. And I think in both your case and our case, here's our advantage. On the continent, there's almost nobody in law in the whole legal universe who has ever made any use of this stuff. So the fun part was, and what those guys themselves, the critical theorists have to say about law, is they've never been to law school. They've never tried a case.  So they're very, might be very into it as a kind of philosophical gesture, but it turns out that we could appropriate them for our legal purposes without having to worry about rivals in Europe who claim that they really know how to do it with law, and without having to worry that they'd already said it all about law. So neither the greats had neither said it all about law, nor did they have followers who had said it all about law using their apparatus. So I would describe myself as, I mean, a shameful appropriator of European critical theory for legal purposes in a deliciously open space where over there, there's nobody who is really going to trash us because the big guys don't know about it and the small guys are all getting l'agrégation or their habilitation or whatever and don't have time for it. There are a few exceptions to that. So the, let's see, now I'm going to close by an idea of how theory, how to distinguish in one way what I see as our typical theory line from the Brit Crit line, but I know that what, I actually read something you wrote about the Brit Critts which I basically think is right. I think you're going to be very disappointed but maybe we'll try to insert a wedge here between us. I would say that the American approach turned out to be usefully understood as an essay by Treves, an Italian sociologist of law in which he makes a distinction between two different approaches to law by people who are theoretically inclined. The first approach is you have a theory or an orientation to social theory in which you recognize right away that law is a very important social institution and you incorporate law into your theory.  If you're derrida even, at some point decides he has to deal with law. So the theorist approaches law within the frame of their big frame and they try to figure out how law fits or doesn't fit and what original things you might say about law if you understood it as part of this general theory model. That's a very basic, very common approach in the theory world. The other approach is the obsession with the object. So people like me are obsessed with the object, law, legal discourse, legal practice and its political impact and the possibility of using it for political purpose and with the question of its relationship itself as the slave of politics. So this is my object and in this approach you eclectically use the theory tools that are available. So in my case, I totally love postmodernism. I love Marxism. I love them all. I love Foucault just as much as I love Derrida. I love Sark more than any of them. And my basic idea is I love economics. I really like Ricardo. Ricardo, I've been teaching Ricardo and I lecture on Ricardo in relation to Marx in terms of the theory of surplus. So the basic idea here is use many, many, many things to draw a bead on the object. So it means abandoning the idea of being the author of the grand theory, being the person who got law finally by placing it in the grand theory but mastering enough of the critical vocabulary. So here would be a rough example.  Clearly there's holes which are very powerful. But then you also need paranoid structuralism. That is the idea that if there are holes there's sinister things that you're not conscious of that are controlling everything you do without knowing it.  Foucault, the early Foucault mentalité side is very like that. So that's also needed. We need the sort of luscious totality that realizes itself through history but we also need the sense that our very subjectivity is a mere artifact. The subject is just an intersection in language or blah, blah, blah, something like that. But then also another thing we need is if you like the sebiotic. That is the idea that as opposed to totalities and as opposed to paranoid structuralist structures the world is just a giant proliferation of science systems within which we are speakers and everything is speaking, speaking, speaking. It's the linguistic turn. It's incredibly valuable and important. And last of all I would say we need the decisionist turn. That is the turn that I would say is represented by Kierkegaard, by Nietzsche, by Karl Schmidt, by Sartre also which basically says all very well but over and over and over again that will run out.  There won't be a warrant. That's all very fine. The theory whether it's human rights or new materialism or whatever or postmodernism is gonna run out. And then at this level it's important to contemplate looking to the horror of the situation and say either I'm gonna kill the kid because God told me to or I'm not. So that's the endless theme. Now I wanna say one word about costas. So when people say we are enemies, we have to be enemies. It is required that critical. And look, so he was trying to, he just wanted to gin it up. He has a desire that that should be true. So I first met costas, it turns out in 1984. What do we decide to do for? So in 1984. I would say that we had an unbelievable conversation that bears a strong relationship to the things I've been talking about in this talk. It was very, very much in the context of costas. Alan Hunt was running a poly, a left wing poly. Costas was, you were very junior. You were really at the bottom of the pile. A million of the questions raised were about activism, both outside law faculties and inside law faculties. What is it to attack? What is an ideological assault on the other side as opposed to just being a theorist here by myself who other left theorists will admire? So every one of those seems to be present. And although we don't know each other very well, I've always actually seen you, as I think you've seen me, as someone who is basically a camera. And I'm delighted to have you here. It makes me feel very good and warm that you're here. Brilliant, how can you follow that? I mean, listen to some of these American academics. You feel overwrought. And perhaps you may have heard that one of the most legendary events in the history of American crits is the three-hour lecture that Robert Unger gave and now, of course, goes by the name Critical Legal Studies. And I was not there, but everyone told me how brilliant it was, coming in sentences, paragraphs, sort of pages. It was like seeing it on the PowerPoint. They didn't have PowerPoint. And then, Dan can tell me, the guy was rehearsing it for three days in a room full of mirrors. And he was talking to himself. And that's how he delivered such a brilliant talk. And this is not something that Dan can does. I mean, Dan can is a natural. Dan can does it without need to rehearse. And I think what Dan can did today, what you gave us again today, is a gift, another gift. Because for me, Dan can's nickname is Dan can the gift.  You don't introduce the gift into an economy of exchange, of offer and acceptance, of equivalence and reciprocity. Because then you undermine the nature of the gift. The gift works, the gift performs, if and when, at a later point, the recipient of the gift acts, gestures in ways that are informed by the original gift. And in this way, through the performance, through the repetition in a different context, you mentioned Kierkegaard in that respect, because both time is created and communities emerge. And in that sense, I would say that with Dan can, we had over the last 30 years, an intimate but non-operative community. Intimate but not operative, because we met a few times, but for me, he gave me gifts. So I mentioned two or three gifts that he gave me and were absolutely central in my development and thinking the first is precisely going back to 1983. When I got my first job as a young lecturer, not that young, but anyway, as a new lecturer at Middler's Expoly, my head of school said, Costes, you write things which are incomprehensible to the lawyer, even to him, the great talent head. Secondly, you have radical politics. And third, a strong accent. You're not going to go far. I think that I still take all three of these, all three of these boxes. And then the following year, 1984, it was a hard workshop. It was the first time I met Dan can and listened to Dan can, but they also met, I think, Hugh Collins for the first time in Nikki Lace, he's Nikki here now, I don't see her. And then after the brilliant talk he gave at UCL, I think it was, or the institute, I'm not sure now. We went to a restaurant, an Indian restaurant, and we discussed Sartre and Gramsci and legal theory and how you do it in an institution. And then we sang Italian patis and songs. Avanti popolo alla discorsa. And obela ciao, and so on. And then I thought to myself, okay, perhaps I do have a chance. If Dan can and Kennedy can do these things, even with my strong accent, I mean, he takes the other two boxes, critical theory, difficult theory and radical politics, not a strong accent, although it is strong here in Europe. So we can still do it. The second event happened about 10 years later, in 1993 after a bunch of us set up the backpack law school. And I remember that in the first year, a couple of our students, mature students, were recording everything we said, including personal tutorials. They would turn up in a personal tutorial with a little tape recorder in those days and record everything they were saying. And then we learned that the association of conservative lawyers wrote to the law society and told the law society that they should not give us accreditation. We didn't have an accredited degree as yet. And of course, without accreditation, you cannot have a law degree. At that point, I confronted one of those two students and I said, are you spying on us? Because the letter which was sent to the college and we saw it had detailed references both to our writings and also some quotes from Lexus. So I said, are you spying on us? What are you trying to do? I mean, if we don't get accreditation, the year and a half you spent here would be totally waste of time. And the woman said, no, no, no, we're not spying on you, but you must know that there is a huge campaign to stop you guys from becoming the Harvard of Britain and imitating Duncan Kennedy. Now the idea that Batman would become the Harvard of Europe was not really ridiculous, so we just forgot about that. It goes back to what stories Duncan said earlier. But the idea of imitating Duncan Kennedy, again, I felt it was a little gift that I was receiving from the guy because by then I knew his work, I was teaching his work, I really loved what he was doing and so on. So I thought to myself, you know, that's a good thing to be imitating if you possibly can. And on this one I should also say that over my long career in the university, I have perhaps met very many, perhaps most major intellectuals in the world. Right now Slavoj Žižek is giving a lecture at my institute next door at Birkbeck and I'm here because I prefer to be with Duncan not with Slavoj. And I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but when you meet people that you read, you usually get very disappointed. There is a mismatch between the writings and the person. And Duncan, a couple of other people, is a huge exception to that. His behavior, his comportment, his writings match each other almost perfectly. Words and deeds, words and songs go brilliantly together. And that is another gift. But the final gift, of course, is precisely the gift of critical legal studies, a persistent and continuous gift because it was precisely when these guys opened the space, created the name, created a certain aura that the space for us here to start a movement in the School of Thought and the way of looking at the world really took off. And indeed it was in 1985, a year after we met Duncan, that we had the first conference at Kent, Joanne was there, and I think Hugh was there and perhaps a few other people in the audience, the first conference, critical legal conference, and of course the conference is still going on every year. In the first weekend in September, we're now in the 20, close to 30th conference, it is happening still. And this is another question, why we did not collapse in the way the Americans did. I was at the last American conference, I think it was 1994 at the June old staff. And there was an amazing incident for us, the Brit crits who were there, you know, sort of to, in a sense, take in the great spirit of our American colleagues that in a session in which, I think, Mark Tassnet was there and some of the incoming young people, people of color and women and so on ended in a pro and Tassnet left the stage saying that, you know, he has no longer a place in this conference and then Duncan gave the final talk, he was chaired by Kim Crenshaw, so therefore he was playing to both constituencies and did very well, I remember. So that is sort of the beginning for us, you know, they had created that kind of spice that we could, in a sense, upstarch, as not particularly well-known, neither Mrs. Thatcher, nor, I don't know, Lord Lester ever mentioned us, because great threats or great hopes for legal education. But then an abiding experience for a young person who came from Greece in 1974 after the dictators and so on and did my doctorate here and then started my work, was this. The total lack, actions of critical, of legal scholarship and legal research from the rest of the academy. The only reason in 1983 when I started my career than a philosopher or a person in English or in art, theater, history, whatever would go to law is if they would get the divorce. But then if you look at the history of Western civilization from the Bible to Plato and Aristotle all the way to Cannes, Hegel, Marx, but even the contemporaries, Luhmann and Derrida and Habermann and so on, when thinking turned to the way in which body attaches to soul and society institutions get reproduced, of course they went to law. They knew law and Dan can mention it or they read legal stuff in order to understand the principle of reproduction of society. So what had happened? Law and legal study and legal scholarship used to be central, a central part of our Western civilization and then had become totally peripheral and legal pedagogy was parochial and vocational and had nothing to do with any wider field. And this is in a sense the gift that we owe on a more continuous, persistent basis to Duncan and his comrades that they opened up that space but then of course we came also to occupy and we tried to occupy it precisely by trying to push back again both scholarship and pedagogy towards where it belongs which is the heart of the academy and the heart of our culture. And I'm really proud to say today that there is no major conference in philosophy, in history, in art theory or in visual studies that will not have also a lawyer or a law academic speaking about these matters. We have I think helped reintroduce legal scholarship and legal research into the heart of the academy. Now what did we have to do that? And this is not about me, this is about a bunch of people, many of them in this very room. We faced in legal theory, and I'm speaking now just about legal theory, a monolithic construct with its own different of course versions and tendencies and factions and so on which was based on two, on one question and one claim. The question was for legal theory when we started what is law? It was an attempt, an essentialist attempt to find what is the essence of law. And once that essence was declared or pronounced then a process of purification, the pure theory of law, a good example of that of cleansing, whatever is not law, leave it out. And we concentrate into what law is, these are the characteristics of law and then we seek them out in different phenomena and then those that have the characteristics then they are law. And the second, the claim was that irrespective of what are the characteristics of law, whether it is rules or principles or norms, whether it was a positivistic or a normative or interpreted jurisprudence, the law is a system. It is internally coherent, it follows either a certain derivation of norms from a central norm or central rule or it is organized as a set of principles, the integrity or the fairness or equal respect and concern and these principles put the whole thing together. And when we start now looking at this and taking our cue and I think our inspiration very much from the Americans, the first thing we do is to attack the deterministic thesis you remember to attack that idea of oda. In other words, to take now the law of text and bring it to the texts of law to use an array of methods in theories from semiotics, from literary theory, from hermeneutics, from psychoanalysis to see how the legal text operates because our main principle was that if there is sexism, there is racism, there is class exploitation and oppression in society, that should also appear on the body of the text. That through the organization of the text, you can find the symptoms or the wounds of that underlying trauma. So that was the first period, I would call it an aesthetic period, a period in which those more literary terms and methods were used. Then in the 90s, we had a second period, the period of ethics or ethicization because of course, after 1989, you got the turn to ethics, humanitarians, human rights, the end of history, the world has come together, international law had its big debt, still does. Because since we now have a united world, whether as a cosmopolitan or an imperial world, clearly the question of rights, the question of entitlements applies in the same way all over the place. And first with that, and of course, with a certain defeat that was felt, the defeat was the collapse of communism and of course the collapse of communism had more people like us who were totally anti-Stalinists, who were not, I was not allowed to go to the Eastern Europe countries because I couldn't get a visa, because I was well known as someone who was critical, but we of course got also the defeat and the failure of the Berlin Wall. The bricks of the Berlin Wall hit us on the head more than the Stalinists, who very easily transubstantiated the Eastern Europe and became the new oligarchs and so on. So we wanted to ethics, the idea of an ethics became contested. We needed to find ways from which we could have a discussion with our liberal colleagues on human rights and the rest of it, but in attacking that kind of approach. And of course there we discovered ideas of otherness, of radical otherness coming out of the Jewish tradition, coming out of, you know, from Levinas and Buber to Derrida, the idea that there is a justice which is imminent to the law and when the law does not come up with those fair and just answers that itself proclaims to promote, then of course you attack it but then of course you are in alliance with many liberals, but there is also a second justice, a justice which is transcendent, which is outside the legal system and which the whole of law, the whole of the legal edifice has to give an account. And pretty soon that, I think, came to an end. We moved from the period of the end of history, the period of the New World Order. If the New World Order that President Bush announced in 1989 existed, it was the shortest in history because it came to an end in the late 2000s and of course now with a huge crisis, particularly in Europe and Southern Europe and so on, we are in a new field. We have entered an age of resistance. This age of resistance has its landmarks. You can call them formally from the Arab Spring or the way to the Indignados to Greece then to Occupy, then Turkey, Brazil. We know that people get out again in the streets. We don't know when, but we know that that kind of fossil sense of peace and reconciliation is no longer on the go. And this is where now we as lawyers find ourselves in a third phase and of course these phases are very artificial. They overlap and so on. I'm not saying that there is a strict periodization in which necessarily you're asked to take a more political stance, some more than others, particularly here in Europe, particularly in the South of Europe and so on. But this idea that now we have to take a political stance or a more obvious political stance in relation to ethical concerns and aesthetic practices, I think you know sort of is, can be helped very much by what is happening to the law and Duncan has extensively written about the way in which in a neoliberal bio-political I would suggest legal system that we now have. The rule of law tradition that we all loved even if we criticized it is in a sense on the way out. The form of law has become detailed. The sources have become multiple. The aims and clear and contradictory the effects unpredictable. The great claim of law in the rule of law in modernity was that there is a distance albeit imperceptible between law and the order of the world. That there is a distance between the is and the ought. And to that extent law like socialism or religion or nationalism was there to correct society. And that is the distance. That is the role of the distance between the is and the ought. You may disagree with the particular policies that the legal ought was pursuing in different stages, different accounts and so on. But there was a distance and that distance has now collapsed in a huge law society amalgam that has validity that has power but has very little value and significance anymore. And this is where for the critical lawyer particularly at a political stage the answer to the attempt to find positions after utopia has atrophied. And iman and critique has been co-opted is a very major issue. But something that I think younger colleagues and younger friends and comrades have taken on and in a series of blogs and so on promote this idea of a new politics of law. But I want to finish with a reference to a superb piece of critical scholarship with radical intent that Duncan just published in the general law and critique and you can find it online in a library close to you or on your laptop. The piece is called the hermeneutics of suspicion in American legal thought. Duncan says that elite jurists try to uncover hidden ideological motives behind what they consider their own legal argument of their opponents while claiming of course that their own answers are innocent of ideology, a true right, correct and innocent of ideology. This suspicious hermeneut as Duncan calls these characters believes that legal reasoning is sufficiently determinate so as to allow him to identify mistakes in others but also to give him the right answer. Now of course I think all of us here have been there. Right in a piece of the trial and analysis we place ourselves in the position of a super supreme court, of a super house of laws or constitutional court who can iron out the inconsistencies and reach the correct or the politically effective or the aesthetically pleasing answer. But in a brilliant move, Duncan argues that the main influence of ideology is on the direction of legal work and not on legal error. That it is ideology that makes you write what you write and argue what you argue rather than leading you to error. This is where you have to focus. Indeed it is not particularly hard to show that a text, any text, the Bible, Shakespeare or the latest decision of a court is full of contradictions and inconsistencies. It is much harder to work out what practices, procedures and ruses make texts appear coherent and authoritative and making a next brilliant move from text to context Duncan argues that the rise of this hermeneutics of suspicion follows transformations in the relationship between law and politics and in that between elite jurists and on the other hand, political, economic and social elites. This is the hermeneutics of suspicion. Now of course as you know, the concept of the hermeneutics of suspicion which was used by recurve but has been taken up by a number of people refers to what Louis Althusser called the three great continents of thought which is Hegel Marx and the dialectics of Stragout, Nietzsche, Foucault and this giant synthesis between will and power and finally of course Freud and the post-Freudian tradition. And I think it is for me the greatest in a sense praise and admiration I can give to Duncan in saying that both in that piece but also throughout his work he has used all three positions from a hermeneutics of suspicion in the way in which through the rewriting of the idea of indeterminancy and the fundamental contradiction moved towards a post-Marxist theory of ideology. Ideology no longer as something which is superstructural and can be getting rid of but as something that opens to us the world and therefore our business and our duty, political duty is not as Marx said in the famous 11 theses to fall back to change the world it is to reinterpret the world in order to change it. That ideology is our opening to the world. And similarly of course in terms of his discussion of quotient politics and so on and of course in that piece he claims that those kind of rather silly hermeneutics of suspicion get involved and he uses the psychoanalytical term of a projective identification in other words they project to their enemies the basic split they displace typical Freudian position they displace into their opponents what they fear in themselves they have the inner conflict and then in order to defend their psychic economy they put it onto you. And I can finish by saying that although Duncan sees this idea of projective identification as something problematic many of us have projectively identified with you Duncan and in a sense I think that piece but all the work shows that Duncan is one of the last great European intellectuals. Those people who as it were are descendants of what we call the radical enlightenment but also that erudition that goes with say central European Jewry a kind of tradition that is now on the way out and Duncan is one of the great I think representatives of that tradition. So and against the derrida I will finish saying thank you Duncan. I'm a bit disappointed at this station. We've got about a quarter of an hour 20 minutes for questions so perhaps we can see he's got a microphone so perhaps we can just open it out. Silence, no hands.  Ah, Lin. Hello, Lin Marshman from Seawasse. It's very quick, thank you both obviously. I won't say that anymore. I teach a human rights clinic here at Seawasse and I was wondering there's been a very interesting piece by Bethany Galopas at AL about six human rights clinicians and poverty lawyer workers now 2011 and I know you've seen it. And it's about the impact critical legal studies on the pedagogy and practice of grew from a discussion between poverty clinic lawyers and human rights clinic lawyers in the States and makes a lot of drawing on exactly the points you were talking about. How you take the lessons of critical legal scholarship which has been critical of clinics now because human rights is very interesting and how you teach that to the students not just in terms of client-client relationship but more broadly in terms of immersion or understanding of the issues that you were talking about, economic and social rights in particular in the States. We're looking at human rights as a US issue not international issue only. But actually my question is you said because you haven't seen the article. But I was wondering- Well I can of course answer it anyway. Yes, if you would because of your introduction about the work you were doing with landlord tenants stuff earlier than the critiques that are being made now. So because I haven't read the article I'm not gonna answer it but it does seem worth mentioning that in the critical legal studies as an actual academic movement was a heterogeneous mixture and one of the most interesting aspects of it was the back and forth tension between people you might describe as roughly post-Marxist not anti-Marxist but post-Marxist the human rights oriented people the identity oriented people not exactly the same though related and the people in the tendency that I more or less represent which Costas was describing. So the in the US there has been I think a very constructive though there's less of it now than there used to be back and forth which was partly between people actively doing serious social justice activism either say oriented to class issues or where therefore to say tenant rent strikes or oriented to a human rights ideas a very powerful overarching belief of theirs that those were the abstractions we would say that really do orient work in a fairly concrete way and then the identity political dimension of it had to do with the extent to which there are identities that very powerfully determine or orient conduct and aspirations if you are say in our case the very important issue was African American identity and the other one was female identity. So critical of the studies has been a site for arguments back and forth in which within the movement there were and now everybody spun out but the relationships among the people still exist to what extent should one understand say human rights or capital or identity as in some way both really explaining and really orienting change and to what extent that doesn't work because over and over again the explanation is too weak and the question of what to do ends up in this decisionist moment in which you have to make a leap of some type. So this article is doubtless part of the continuing discussion which has been very valuable I think for everybody. Thank you, Virginia Montuvaldi UCL. I really enjoyed your presentations. I wanted to ask Professor Kennedy you drew a distinction at some point which I didn't catch exactly between your approach to the law which views it as an object you said and a Marxist approach to the law. Can you explain this a little bit more? I meant to make a general contrast between the idea that your general approach which could be Marxism, human rights, Vibrarian sociology, it could be literary critical or linguistic so you have a general approach and law is one of the things that you incorporate into your overall presentation and synthesis so there would be and I completely agree with Costas that in the tradition of political philosophy law has been a very important part of your political philosophy, whatever it is. It might not be when you start out but after a while you gotta have law in there or the political philosophy looked at as a whole is not gonna be experienced as conveying one of the central sites of discourse about society. And Costas was lamenting the disappearance of this and I limit it too. But the point about this is slightly different. Here the idea is another approach which Treves describes the other approach is obsession with the object. So the object is law, some set of aspects of law that are the object of interest. And you say, that's what I'm interested in. I wanna use whatever I can find. So I'm gonna be a scavenger. I'm gonna try to learn as much as I can about as many of the optics as possible and that's the classic idea of triangulating law, of getting it through the multiplication of perspectives. So objectivity is only the multiplication of perspectives. You're objective to the point where you can understand it economically, phenomenologically, culturally, psychoanalytically. The more you have, the more contradictory ways to produce different images, the closer you are to the truth in heavy quotation marks. So here the idea is two different approaches to Marxism and law. One approach is what is the Marxist theory of law or how could I as a Marxist develop a Marxist theory of law as a contribution to the general development of Marxist social theory. My attitude is how can I appropriate or scavenge or in pretentious Levi-Strauss talk, do bricolage with say, class as a concept, say the concept of ideology, say the concept of revolution as ways to combine with say the psychoanalytic or the Nietzschean or whatever as to approach law. So the question, the differences between a eclectic methodological pluralism that nonetheless is committed to relatively high levels of specific precision within each of the elements. They have to be a good Marxist to do this. You just have to be at the same time, good at say, semiotics, versus the aspiration to make Marxism the science of society. Thank you. Alfredo Sanofilo from Source, but thanks very much for both presentations, they were absolutely wonderful. I would like to have a bit of a background of the kind of long-term trajectory of the legal left, not being a lawyer myself. I think some of the tribulations that both of you described were common across the social sciences with the ascendance of neoliberalism, the retreat of the left broadly and so on. Do you see changes happening more recently? And I think the very fact that you have this tremendous audience here today shows not only the influence of your own work, but also the fact that Source is a special place and that lots of young scholars across the social sciences concerned with inequities and injustice in the world out there and what can we do about this? Do you see changes within your own discipline and do you see any elements of weakness in the mainstream and of the rise of an alternative that kind of resonates with your own work over time? I wish you hadn't asked me that question because, but this is typical. So I was having a conversation with a colleague who was maybe 10 years younger than me this morning and she began a sentence by saying, one of the things about young people today is. So, I basically feel the sentence, this sentence comes trippingly off my tongue. The thing about young people today in my milieu of the legal academy is that there was an unmistakable, very deep cultural shift to the center from the left and to the right from the center. Not a flip from the left to the right but from the left to the center and from the center to the right. And it's way beyond politics. It's even beyond a category like neoliberalism doesn't fully account for it. There is a sense of the appeasing of the passions of the 70s, 80s and 90s. It's as though some of it is post-traumatic. So in some of the legal academy, a young professor will say, above all we must not reproduce the Lebanese civil wars of legal academy in the 80s. Of course, they were seven, even more than 20 years. They were seven when those wars were happening but they still have now internalized from their older colleagues the idea that serious left contestation is unbelievably toxic and dangerous. And that has to do also with so. But now, is that completely unrelated to deeper generational change? So of my students, my students today are the product of a series of sociocultural 60s events that are not about burning bras or rioting in the street. They're also the product of the divorce wave in the United States. In the United States, everybody in the upper third of the income distribution, everyone got divorced between 1975 and 1985. It's an actual verified thing. Every single person who was married got divorced. I didn't get divorced. But everybody else got divorced except me and my wife. So, and what that produced was something that is just visibly present in the culture today. The culture of middle and upper middle class children is an enormous number of them grew up with a single parent. And for an enormous number of them, their parents' divorce is an incredibly central thing. Very like the battle at Harvard Law School in 1985 is what happened to their families. That age cohort today gets married when they're 30. They have their first child when they're 31. And the divorce rate for this socioeconomic stratum is now the lowest it has been since 1900. So, I know this sounds really bizarre, right? I mean, the cultural change is profound. And I don't, myself, easily glom onto one of the reasons why I'm going to retire at the end of next year is that I don't easily find anymore in the room that responsive element of longing for something a little explosive that I think has to be, for my idea of the left, has to be there. So, I don't have a lot of hope for the young people today. On the other hand, nobody, my age, ever has more than hypocritical expression of hope for young people today. Okay, can I come in on this? No, we can disagree on this. Now we can disagree on this. Now, of course, in a sense, I kept thinking that when he talks about the United States, I have no idea what's happening in the United States, and resistances of all types are located, are situated in particular societies, histories, traditions, and so on. And he may be right in what he's saying, but again, I would not necessarily put the greatest emphasis on generational issues, but on ways in which capitalism has changed over the last 20 or 30 years, starting with Mr. Reagan and Mrs. Stachek here, and of course, culminating in what we see in the night days in Europe with the state and so on. And one of the key aspects of that, what we call neoliberal, for lack of a better word, period, is the fact that we're asked to turn our own selves into little businesses, and that we ask to create markets about every kind of activity that we took for granted, particularly in a kind of post-war social democratic contract here in Europe. And of course, that has a very important ideological effect, the way in which people see themselves in relation, say, to health, to education, but also in terms to consumption, and that endless and nihilistic desire to consume. But then resistances have happened, and I claim, perhaps a little optimistically, that we have now entered an age of resistance, that there was a long hiatus from 68 or 70 and so on, and I think 2010, 11, a long hiatus in which that kind of economic and political arrangement, in a sense, changed the world quite a lot, but now we have entered, I think, a new period. I mean, both in terms of liberal initiatives, but certainly in terms of political initiatives, we see now that people are taking to the streets, you know, we saw it here in this country, repeatedly saw us, has been, of course, one of the main places where, indeed, the staff resistance has been happening. Well, let me also say something, perhaps of little importance to many of you, but I think, eventually, of huge importance. This Sunday, we have the European elections for the Europe. Today in Britain, because Britain, as you know, was on Thursdays in the next 26 countries or something. In my country of birth, Greece, if the radical left party wins these elections, it is likely to be the first ever elected radical left government in Europe within the next six months. If that happens, if people see all over Europe that a small place like Greece, which, of course, was picked as a guinea pig of that austerity experiment that we saw, and of course, you know, is going through a huge humanitarian crisis, stood up, and reversed policies and governments and elites of 40, if not of 200 years, then it seems to me that people in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal will start thinking the same. So we do have openings, and of course, they differ from place to place. It is, I think, what we have to resist is that kind of left melancholy. That left melancholy, and I'm not saying that Dan has it, but, you know, you see it everywhere, amongst the left. That idea, and I'm using here a term from Walter Benjamin, where you have become so obsessed with your left object and indeed with the failure of your left object that you have totally internalized that defeat and you are happier to be wallowing in despair, and melancholy and so on, rather than getting out in the street, whether it is in a micro-political sense or the more macro-political sense that we're talking about earlier, then trying to do things. I think in Oslo, we have handed a new period all over the world, and certainly in Europe. Thank you. Do you have a desire to win? I completely agree with everything that Kosta said. The question was about young academics, say, in my universe, in the United States, but I actually completely agree with that. Do you have a desire to win? Do I have a desire to win? Yes, actually, a very strong desire to win. I don't identify with state power very much, so when I think of the desire to win, I don't think of, I'm not Napoleonic, so I don't have that sense of what it is to win, but I'll give you actually an example of the pleasure of winning. It gives me incredible pleasure that in the United States, the governing elites, the ruling class, is losing its confidence in the Israeli government, and I've participated in a small way for a while in the process of winning. It's actually an experience of winning. It's intoxicating, it's wonderful. It's not Napoleonic, but actually you're doing something in a relatively consistent way, and time passes, and it's different at the end. I love that, and I think that's totally possible at the level that Kostas is talking about, and I don't equate American legal academia with legal academia anywhere else. I mean, where I was talking about America. In France, for example, or in Italy, I just spent two days participating in a little leftist master's program. That was in September. I was on the platform with Tony Negrae. Nobody could understand a word he said. Sorry, it was completely incomprehensible. It was a student audience, there were maybe 150 Italian students. They came in, the room was packed. They came in totally, totally bright-eyed, just their whole body language with intense attention. But it was very complicated theory of the multitude, replacing class and the comments, and at some point they started texting. There was this sort of weird thing you were saying, away, are they texting each other? They're mothers? They're girlfriends? But, so I love that, though. So that's, I'm totally, I adore that kind of thing. And I think there's more, I actually, I'm much more oriented. You guys don't look like they're men. Well, I do think, though, that, actually, you've challenged me. Right, I don't, I agree with you that that depressed thing is bad. I agree that the way I put it, because it's really about legal academia in the United States, I do think that it's a fairly fair representation of legal academia in the United States, once a site of incredibly interesting stuff, and now not. But, but, I have a very strong feeling that resistance, that it is an age where new forms of resistance are coming into existence. And actually, I see my role, in part, if no longer in a site that's dramatically central to exciting resistance practices, but the whole idea was to develop left analysis that would be useful, not to lawyers, but to potential clients. So let me make that distinction. The idea wasn't that lawyers were to actually be the people in charge. The idea was that left analysis, whether in the law and development domain, landlord-tenant, or whatever, would be available that there would be a larger and larger archive of academic work that, say, Sarisa comes to power, somebody's, they're gonna have a gigantic set of debates about law and development, basically, in which every extant theory will be on the table. And so, we made our students read Scott Newton, maybe someone in Sarisa will actually read about Uzbekistan, or something like that in 1925. That could actually happen. And that's very helpful. And I also have the hope for the return of the children, so of these. So if I'm still alive, here's my image. There will be a rise of left legal academia. There'll be millions of American radical left students. They will be having an enormous rally. And at the beginning of the rally from the wings, I will be in a wheelchair, and I'll be wheeled out onto the stage and turned to face the audience as a kind of backdrop as the proceedings unfold. That would be great. I'll be winning. Unfortunately, that's, I think we're at the end of our time, a lot of time, I think we'd love to. Would you like to comment? More from you. The prospects are wheeling you out like Jeremy Bentham sounds quite funny. Can I just thank both of our panelists? I think it's been wonderful, I think. It's a fabulous way to start this afternoon. Thank you.


Everybody forced here. I'm ripping six boxes of 2022 select draft picks football first off the line. These are for Jeremy B. Jeremy. Thanks for the order, man Let's see what you got See an orange pulsar pick it out of here all your Penn State family will hit some Datsun's and Brian Robinson's and how old or not. I'm sorry Some Datsun's and briskers for you I think Michael Parsons might be in here too. I'm not sure whether our Penn State players are in here Datsun right there orange pulsar drew blood so to start concourse 24 26 Skymore on the base auto hyper Kelsey purple field level miles Garrett 32 of 75 Robinson Garrett Wilson orange pulsar concourse Khalil Mack 7 of 26 a DeMarvin leal base auto field level red Rokwan Smith Number 42 of 149 a tricolor Mike Williams Number 193 of 199 field level Dustin Crumb on the orange pulsar auto number 10 of 30 Yeah, hyper concourse Rikijan Datsun an orange field level rookie Matt Corral Number 19 out of 49 Mike Williams orange pulsar a nice color match there Clemson color match 9 out of 26 Kyle Phillips on the base auto field level red Leonard for net 93 of 149 there Hyper Jake plumber orange pulsar concourse a mod sauce gardener Nice house 22 of 26 an orange pulsar youth explosion auto Derek Stingley jr. 12 out of 30 We're back to back in the draft back to back in this pack Jake plumber field level tricolor to 199 concourse rookie Orange Kyron Williams on the orange pulsar 6 out of 26. He's gonna get some snaps this week for sure Carson strong on the base auto Got a field level white Mike Williams 23 out of 25 Where's Sam? I don't know I am not about the tech Sam at 1 12 in the morning and ask what he's up to Silver concourse Tom Brady bucks. I would hope he's not awake honestly for break and daytime Let me check the GPS Sam is probably somewhere in the state of florida. Yeah He's a florida man now. He just gets you know hype about everything now Didn't ever ask where I am when I'm not here No, didn't think so no Orange pulsar Justin Ross rookie field level Number two of 26. They're just a sigh of relief. Oh, I can enjoy the brakes Justin Hall base auto Samson Florida confirms hyper Rathaus burger concourse rookie purple Kyron Williams 29 of 75 You better be I don't think he's allowed to leave the state. It's a trouble. He's got an ankle bracelet It's a florida man now Mount Dora versus you just gave him the week Orange pulsar JJ Watts Nice one there 13 at 26 and a Bailey zappy orange pulsar auto 11 of 30 Okay, Rob. That makes me feel safe. Thank you for always watching Jake paul or silva. Oh, I don't know probably Jake paul because I'm sure it's fixed And silva's not like a boxer and he's a lot smaller than paul Got tricolor concourse Zach wilson numbered 110 of 199 I'm just sad people still buy those fights Yeah Concourse, uh, orange pulsar matthew stafford numbered two out of 26 My stafford dustin crumb base auto Hyper concourse rookie gary wilson a red concourse rookie trivon walker six of 149 Only quilla sensations silver. All right, three more jeremy. Good luck, man. Had a zappy. That was pretty nice We got that one in a bag like I said, maybe we'll see a picket now Like a one of one. Maybe a color wheel orange pulsar travis calcy field level number two out of 26 Redemption coming up. There's a purple d-hop field level 67 of 75 Chubb Drew breeze and a wandale robinson rookie signatures redemption What's the prize joshua? I truly have I didn't even know that this was happening I heard when they announced the silva jake paul fight. I just did I was like, okay, that's gonna happen and that I just forgot about until now concourse orange pulsar famous james 12 out of 26 Heisman winner a national championship winner Jalen philips base auto. We're sorry jalen petrie. I always said philips jalen petrie jalen philips was the rookie last year Tri-color dach field level Number 150 to a 199 Oh, I'm sure jane a white doesn't want that to happen 11 of 30 tyler algear orange pulsar auto white field level rookie derrick singly jr 29 of 35 red field level derrick henry red color match 128 of 149 Masters again blue turf concourse orange pulsar shoy ekman numbered 24 of 26 Purple concourse rookie brian robinson jr 47 of 75 a hyper patent manning Redemption terry castro fields rookie signature If silva wins paul has to fight silva in a kickboxing match. Oh, dude, that would be the end of it That would be the end of it. So so for sure jake paul's winning. Yeah, that's what it's all that's saying That's literally all that I heard is jake paul's winning concourse orange pulsar dam rino 16 and 26 Sean merriman, that's interesting silver auto there. Sean merriman tri-color romeo dobs 127 199 field level hyper kenneth walker Come on big time numbered brady or manning or something.  Oh a kenneth walker 17 of 30 orange pulsar auto nice He's gonna be looking pretty good Look great last week's gonna that's gonna continue man. It's a pretty good team. He's a really good back Nice jason witton concourse tie-dye 20 of 25 Field level rookie kyle hamilton red 148 of 149 Heard that joshua Logan's wrestling roman reigns next saturday Who decided the paul brothers just get to like do all this and I don't know man.  What a time to be alive Nice zebra rookie field level kairan williams Malik willis orange pulsar auto now 25 out of 30. Congrats jeremy Hyper concourse brian robinson mike evans purple field level numbered one out of 75 Paula mallu Picket silver sensation. Excuse me orange pulsar johan dotson. There you go jeremy.  It's 15 of 26 A tyler goodson silver auto field level rookie red nicobi dean Numbered 118 of 149. It looks like a Gold or a tie-dye coming up a tricolor field level rookie kairan williams 172 of 199 Gold sparks treylon berks Nice treylon five out of 10 on the spark sensor treylon berks orange pulsar concourse debon white 13 of 26 another tyler goodson silver auto Hyper zack wilson concourse orange rookie george pickens solid pickens there 12 out of 49 a bailey zappy concourse rookie silver and that'll do it jeremy. Appreciate it again, man Congrats on those nice hits. We'll get them right out to you


So, hello and thank you for joining us today for today's Public Good App House demo event. So joining me today, we have James McBryan, founder and CEO of Track It Forward, a volunteer time tracking system to help grassroots and nonprofit organizations. Thousands of schools and nonprofits have used Track It Forward to track time in order to meet grant requirements and force membership levels and retain volunteers through recognition programs. Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. I'm James from Track It Forward. All right. So the thing with tracking hours is that it's very difficult to do. Nobody likes to track hours. I'm sure if you're a nonprofit and you've tried to do that before, you're like, oh, just track it on paper or spreadsheet, but it doesn't quite work that well. And so we've worked with thousands of organizations to get tracking hours working well for them. And the reason why organizations track hours is to retain volunteers, increase accountability and access grant funding through the data that is collected. So the key thing to do to making Track It Forward work to getting volunteers to actually track hours is it has to be simple. So it's a one, two, three process of one, you get the volunteer to actually volunteer and show up. I mean, you can do that through our system. Number two, you've got to get them to track the hours in the way that makes sense to them. There are 10 different ways of tracking hours on Track It Forward, and that is key to getting the data that you need. And lastly is creating reports not just for the organizer, but for the volunteer as well. And that is the key. And that's what we did with Track It Forward. So right now, to date, there's over 21.5 million hours that have been tracked over with over a thousand organizations here, some of the people that have done it. Every single second right now, an hour is being tracked in our system. That's how much it's being used at the current moment. So here's a quick demo. So again, the key here is it for, this needs to be simple, basically. So here's our mobile app, some screenshots from it. It looks like a basic form, right? Select your hours, the date, the activity, and after those hours are submitted, the volunteer can instantly see their milestone requirements. This is a minimum requirement of 10 hours, but this is completely adjustable, which we'll show you in a little bit. And then on the organizer side, the organizer can approve or reject those hours and send messages to those volunteers in order to continue encouraging them to volunteer. Another way that volunteers volunteer on Track It Forward, again, this is one of the 10 ways that people can volunteer is using the event sign-up sheets. This is kind of like your sign-up.com or sign-up genius where volunteers are RCP, you do all the communication, et cetera. But the key difference here on Track It Forward is when the volunteers at the event itself, they can sign in on a digital sign-in sheet, and then they can sign out as well when they're done. And automatically logging those hours. So volunteers actually don't really need to log anything because it's all automatically done. One of our more recent features is our check in and out on-site kiosk. Basically, set up a computer, our laptop, and as volunteers come in and out, they sign in, they register, and they sign out. Everything, again, is automatically logged. I do want to focus on, as I mentioned, this is a one, two, three process. It has to be simple for all the volunteers to actually make it work. It's all about getting those hours collected, approving and verifying them, and creating the reports that are necessary for you and your volunteers. And when I focus on simplicity, I keep saying simple over and over again. That's what we're known for. But behind the scenes, there's something driving it that's actually a bit more complicated, and that's what Track It Forward really helps with. Track It Forward is completely customizable for your organization. And that's the key difference that we found works for organizations. Every nonprofit has their own workflow. You have volunteers sign in in different ways. You have different data that you need to collect, and that is completely adjustable on our system. You can collect what volunteer information you want. You can collect as much hour log data as you want. For example, activity, mileage, GPS coordinates. You can do selfies. You can do signatures, notes, any fields that you want. A popular one is actually amount of garbage collected. That is very important for conservancies to report that upwards, and they can collect it on Track It Forward. And lastly, the types of achievements and requirements that you have in your organization, they're all going to be different, and then you can have multiple ones of them, and we make that completely adjustable. So Track It Forward is known for not only being simple, but completely customizable as well. Because at the end of the day, this is an operational tool, and it needs to match your workflow. So if you're considering volunteer time tracking, or you're doing it right now, and it's not quite working, we have an ebook that we've created that goes through everything we've learned through while getting organizations set up with volunteer time tracking. Just go to trackitforward.com slash ebook. Or if you just want to talk with us and just chat with us, like is your current system working? Is this even a good fit for you? How much work is it going to take to get set up? You can just talk non-profit stuff in general. We've made our team available for the next two weeks for the TechSoup community. Just go to trackitforward.com slash TechSoup. We have our calendars in there. Just sign up and we'll chat with you during this holiday times. So thank you so much and appreciate you guys for coming out.


Hi, it's Bridget. Welcome to Above Life Channel. The purpose here is to inspire your spirit and to fill you up with hope. Today, this is a casual video from my back deck. I am going to ask for some inspiration for myself. It is Mother's Day after all that in the United States here, where I'm when I'm recording this video. And I've had a nice weekend and an enjoyable day, very casual day and try not to work too much. But I kind of want to work, you know. But I try not to work too much. And I could really use some inspiration myself, some pick-me-up energy. I went to an event yesterday and I was an attendee, a participant, and it was like a yoga, a wellness kind of a thing. It was quite enjoyable, but it was very, it was kind of strange for me a bit because I became very aware of how incredibly acutely I use energy as a level of discernment when I meet people. And I am not willing to socialize or just hang out with people just because that's what you do. I am much more of a, I am much more of in a place in my life where I take a stand for what feels right to me and what doesn't. And I don't have to explain myself or apologize or anything like that. But if I meet someone and their energy just doesn't feel awesome to me, then I'm not going to hang out with them. Because chances are our energy is not compatible and I'm probably not going to feel awesome to them. It's just going to be too much effort and too much work. And I probably sound very antisocial and maybe I am a little bit, but I just care too much about energy and the way I feel and the incredible people that we have the opportunity in our lifetimes to meet. That I want to meet the people that are in right alignment for me to meet and spend time with and get to know, you know. And there were a couple of, like there was a couple of really wonderful energetic people that I was like, oh wow, you have great energy, you know. And then there are some other people that are like practitioners or trying to do work for other people. And I'm like, oh my gosh, oh, I'm sure they mean well, but I'm like, oh my goodness, like somebody was trying to educate me about chakras. I was kind of like, I didn't want to be rude or anything and be like, yeah, I said, oh yeah, so I understand about chakras.  I'm like, no, no, no, thank you. You know, and I just kind of, I didn't want to be rude and I didn't want to burst a bubble. But I'm also like, you should probably ask someone and meet them where they're at. You know, talk to someone, engage them more. I mean, I think she was just really excited to talk about her work and stuff. But I'm like, it really kind of made me realize that I need to be much more in awareness about where you guys are. And when I explain things about energy and some of the work that I do, because I know I take it for granted. I know I do, I know. I know I take it for granted that I just, it's natural to me. It's no big deal to me to talk to dead people, to talk to spirits, to talk to angels, to talk to guides, to connect with energy, to see stuff. It's no big deal to me.  And I'm kind about the way that I share and describe things that way. So that was a good reminder for me, I think, yesterday. But I could choose to pick me up, especially because it seems like everybody in our like little country neighborhood here is outside mowing the lawn and using leaf blowers and driving the tractors. And I'm like, oh, it's Mother's Day. Can I please take a break? Can I please have some quiet? No, probably not going to get that. You'll probably hear that in this video. And I have my new sunglasses on for my trip. I just came back from holiday. I was technically supposed to be working. I only worked a little bit. It was tough to work when I was away. Really tough to work when I was away. But I got these great new sunglasses. And so I'm wearing them today. And the sun is kind of in and out of the clouds. It's kind of being a little bit flirtatious today. I guess you'd say the sun is. So all right. So who is going to be the pick me up guest today for me? It's going to have to be somebody pretty awesome since I have to listen to the neighbor and his tractor. You guys, let's invite Freddie Mercury. And how about that? We haven't talked to Freddie. Are you ready, Freddie? We've talked to him for a while. He's got a big pink boa on. It's light pink with a little bit of white and kind of silver on it. And he's trying to be lighthearted. He's honoring the pink of the heart chakra. And I was talking about energy. You guys know that if you watch the playlist for Freddie Mercury, you know that one of his big things in the afterlife is to help sensitive people.  That's how we connect. That's how we communicate. In fact, you are so intuitive in your heart. And oftentimes we don't recognize that as a strength. We see it as a weakness. Wearing your heart on your sleeve. It's like a weakness.   People, people that are watching, these are good things. Aren't they, Freddie? Aren't they good? All right. Can you come over a little closer? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. All right. He says, you need a cat. No, I don't need a cat, my dear. You need a cat, he says. There's a white one with a little bit of gray on it. And so he says, you need a cat. I don't know. A cat? A cat? Yeah, I need one more high maintenance thing to take care of. Okay. Yeah, I do. This is Mother's Day. I'm not supposed to take care of anybody by myself. So Freddie, you need to take care of me. Can you take care of me?   All right. So, you know, interesting. So I happen to be looking at some of my emails and some of the comments on our, on our above life channel on YouTube. Yes, I do read the comments. And it is so crazy when people write, she says this or, you know, she does that or she does this.  And she reads her comments. Kind of sassy about that a little bit. I shouldn't be, huh? I am a little, but I noticed that somebody asked about Mary and you and about children. And I guess you maybe had relationships with women or there's some kind of question about that. And why didn't you, like that Mary maybe wanted a baby, but you didn't want to have a baby with her or something. And you said it was because you didn't really think of her that way. Can you talk about that in relationships? He says, then he says right away to me. We were talking about you. We were going to cheer you up. We weren't going to talk about me, my romantic life. He said it might be quite dull for you to hear about my romantic life with women. That's what he's saying with women. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. And besides Mary is still here on this planet on this plane and it's not very polite to chat about her and talk about private matters, matters that are private. And so we are not, we are not going to do that. But let's talk about Princess Diana because she's in the afterlife and she just had another grand baby, a beautiful boy, baby boy. And so England, you know, they get kind of excited about the royal babies. And so do we in the United States. Do you have anything to say about that or share about that with Princess Diana and her little grand child and such?  They're such a joy, aren't they? It's like everything is brand new. Like there's nothing, there's absolutely nothing wrong with them.  Yeah, they are. I agree with you at first. At first they weren't totally become teenagers. You never had to do that.  Do you feel bad about that? Like, do you miss that? Like you would never have the opportunity to be a grandfather. He says, I was a God parent. It looks like three. I don't know if you had three God children or two, two or three, two, almost three or two of three.  If you guys know, write in the comments below. We're skipping around a bit, Freddie, because I want to keep this interesting.  And Princess Diana is definitely a pick me up and positive energy vibes. So did you ever want to have children of your own? He says, by the time I thought of it, it was far too late, he says. And you have to remember, he says to me all the time, Bridget, you have to remember in those days, it wasn't possible. You know, adoption was very rare. Marriage was rare for same sex marriage. It wasn't a thing. It was so taboo. Everything was so taboo about the relationships that I had, about love, you know, with another man. And it just wasn't feasible. It just wasn't something that really I could allow myself to think of. So go back to Mary then. I mean, I know we don't want to talk too much about her private stuff and the stuff that's private between the two of you guys. I want to be respectful, but at the same time, you could have had, people have babies together all the time that are friends now. You know, there's sperm donors and egg donors and surrogates and all sorts of things like that. And he says, again, he says, that's today, this is your time now. He says, during the time when I would have had children, it's not, that was not, none of those things were really that possible. They weren't really anything anyone ever thought about or talked about. It wasn't, it wasn't common. It wasn't even something to be entertained or to be discussed. And I'm happy that Mary had children. She wanted to have children. And I'm happy that she had children. And I wanted that for her. And I want her children to be happy. And I want her to be happy. And that's all I've ever wanted. I don't know if I could ask her to have a baby for me or I don't know if it's even right for a man to ask a woman that. And he says, it's usually the other way around, isn't it? It seems like so much with their body that I would feel almost intrusive. And that is a lot. That is a lot to ask, he says. So nowadays, would that be different?  He says, but really, really, my life, my life, the nature of my life would not be supportive of a family of children traveling and the way that I make music.  I mean, would you still be singing, producing music? What would you do? He said, making music, making music. Singing if I'm able, as I'm able and writing, collaborating, lots of different kinds of creative projects. I would be doing so many different things and I would be traveling and that would require a great deal of time away and that would not be fair to a family. He says, a significant other is one thing. A partner is one thing but children are a whole other world and while they are lovely and wonderful and just incredible beings of light, I don't know that that was ever really in the plan for me. And then he says, I'm at peace with that. I am at peace with that. I am. I am, yes. Hmm, that's interesting. Well, thank you for that. That was really sweet that you shared. And so, Princess Diana, so what's it like in the afterlife? Like, have you seen her or have you connected? He says, Bridget, you know it's different. It's not as though there's a lounge and we all have drinks together. But if we were to, yes. You could say that we've been connected, yes. And he says, she is a lot of fun. She is a lot of fun. She is a lot of fun. She is a wonderful personality, a generous spirit. And she is so very proud of her family and I am very, very happy for her and for their family, for the new baby. He says, I think he'll be beautiful and do some wonderful things in the world and he has just so many good things to say. So he's just very happy, very happy for her. Yes, yes, very, very happy, very happy for her. And he's showing me kind of like a reverse baby shower, like in the afterlife, like before the baby comes in to the earthly plane, like there's like a celebration there and then the baby comes in, then the spirit incarnates. So can you tell us anything about the baby? About Archie? I mean, I know you're just a friend of Diana's, you know, and we're not asking Diana specifically, but like, is he reincarnated from someone else? He says, well, of course, of course he is. Well, can you tell me who he was? Or is it somebody famous? Or is it an American? Or is it English? He says, you'll have to ask her about that. I think you'll have to ask her about that. He says, that is not my secret to tell. That is not my secret to tell. He says, but that is a fabulous question. That is a fantastic question, he says. All right, you guys, I have to ask that. I have to talk with Princess Diana. I think I do. And she's a lovely interview. He says, oh, yes, very, very beautiful, beautiful and generous spirit. Yeah, she is. All right, my friends, this is Bridget. You have been watching this video. This is my first video of the season out of my beautiful back deck here in Minnesota. It is May. It is springtime. And finally, the sun is starting to come out. Finally, it's getting warm enough where I don't have to wear a parka and a hat and a scarf and mitt in the whole nine yards, you know. And so I look forward to be able to share more videos outdoors with you now here as we go into spring and the summer season as well. Again, this is Bridget. You've been watching Above Life Channel. This particular channeling video is a bit of an inspiration. I wanted to pick me up kind of chat and who better than to ask than to have our friend Freddie Mercury from the afterlife pop in on this beautiful United States Mother's Day, Mother's Day in the US today and give us a pick me up and chat with us. So thank you so much for that. And remember the purpose here is to inspire your spirit to fill you up with hope because this, this right now right here is your life. So let it, just let it. Thanks for watching.