Duncan Kennedy - lecturing in classroom

Credit: Unbound – https://legalleft.org/previous-issues/volumex/

Duncan Kennedy is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Emeritus at Harvard Law School. He is well known as one of the founders of the Critical Legal Studies movement.

This episode is the first segment of Rio Pierce’s interview of Professor Duncan Kennedy. In this part, Kennedy discusses the value of oral histories, describes some key concepts that he will return to throughout the oral history, and delves into a personal and cultural history of CLS. He touches on ideas like: what it really means when we refer to “the elite”; how the substance of movement politics might be affected by its leaders’ childhood and family life; what it means to be a self-serving, solidaristic, and ethically imperfect radical; and how the tumult of the 60s and shared experiences of a generation informed the movement as a whole.

Disclaimer: This episode contains explicit language.