C'est Moi

Minnesota Law Review

Volumn 83, Issue 6, 1999, Pages 1619-1635

  Coughlin, Anne M ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0346053603     PISSN: 00265535     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. I borrow my title and epigraph from C'est Moi, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe, a song in the musical play, Camelot.
2. DANIEL A. FARBER & SIKANNA SHERRY, BEYOND ALL REASON: THE RADICAL ASSAULT ON TRUTH IN AMERICAN LAW (1997).
3. I say that the movement consists of "selected" texts by these scholars because Farber and Sherry do not criticize, for example, the entire canon of critical race or feminist works, but only those works that are attempting to use (what they call) postmodern methodologies to unmask the power relations underlying traditional standards of merit and objective measures of truth. See id. at 13, 140-43. In the interest of brevity, I will use the terms "radical" and "outsider" throughout this essay as a designation for the radical multiculturalists and to refer to the same group of texts that Farber and Sherry criticize.
4. Id. at 23.
5. See id. at 35 ("Legal multiculturalists (like legal scholars generally) may lack some of the sophistication of the best theorists in other disciplines, but they make up for it with a potential for more immediate practical effect.").
6. See id. at 133-37.
7. See id. at 71.
8. Id. at 96 ("We mostly avoid any philosophical discussion of Truth with a capital T . . . ." (emphasis added)).
9. The epigraph reads: "I should be happier about this, the quietist option - and I shall have more to say about quietism later on - if I did not believe that it matters, it always matters, to name rubbish as rubbish, that to do otherwise is to legitimize it." Id. at 3 (quoting unidentified work by Salman Rushdie). I find the use of the word "rubbish" to be a particularly nice touch, since it seems to be a polite way of saying "trash" or "garbage." Its politeness has the effect of placing the reader at a little distance from the disgusting stuff that garbage usually is. "Rubbish" seems to be reserved for things such as old bottles, broken toys, books for which we have no use; it is the province of the dry and the dusty, not the wet and the rotting. The word "garbage" may lead us fairly directly to thoughts of rotting food, dirty diapers, and their nasty smells - connotations that Farber and Sherry presumably would not fully endorse - while "rubbish" lets us detect the bad odor, but just barely. For a fascinating discussion of, among other things, the moral and political functions of our disgust reactions, see WILLIAM IAN MILLER, THE ANATOMY OF DISGUST (1997).
10. FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 2, at 5.
11. See id. at 13-14.
12. See id. at 13 (emphasizing that the authors come from "liberal Jewish backgrounds").
13. For my argument along these lines, see generally Anne M. Coughlin, Regulating the Self: Autobiographical Performances in Outsider Scholarship, 81 VA. L. REV. 1229 (1995).
14. I borrow this line from the title of an essay on autobiography. See Laura Marcus, "Enough About You, Let's Talk About Me": Recent Autobiographical Writing, 1 NEW FORMATIONS 77 (1987).
15. I take this phrase - and I must emphasize that I use it out of context - from a speech by Catharine MacKinnon. See CATHARINE A. MACKINNON, FEMINISM UNMODIFIED 5 (1987).
16. While MacKinnon here insists that feminism's "methodological secret" consists of "believing women's accounts of sexual use and abuse by men," CATHARINE A. MACKINNON, FEMINISM UNMODIFIED 5 (1987), id., she elsewhere emphasizes that a feminist interpretation of these accounts does not reside solely in the meaning that individual women attach to their experiences. Rather, she argues that the accounts must be used to theorize a "feminist standpoint," though she has been less clear than some readers would like in describing what such theorization entails.
17. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence, 8 SIGNS 635, 654 (1983).
18. FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 2, at 96.
19. Id.
20. Id. at 110.
21. Id. at 23.
22. Id. at 106.
23. Id. at 99.
24. See id. at 95-98.
25. See id. at 98-99.
26. Farber and Sherry further remark that it is not enough for lawmakers to verify the facts narrated in an individual account; they also must determine that the account is representative of the experiences that most (or many) members of the outsider group actually are having. Farber and Sherry believe that the experiences reported by the radicals may be atypical, leading them to promulgate a false picture of "how the world works" and, of course, to put forward misguided and unnecessary proposals for social change. See id. at 77-78. For example, many of the outsiders tell stories about discrimination that people of color have endured at the hands of law school appointments committees. These stories imply that the traditional criteria for academic hiring are designed to value the credentials found on white resumes, that these criteria unfairly exclude qualified African-American candidates, and that the standards must be revised so that such candidates may begin to take their rightful share of these prestigious positions. According to Farber and Sherry, these particular stories are "not representative." Id. at 77. Farber and Sherry report that the available data establish that it just is "not true" that minority candidates fare worse than whites in the law school hiring process. To the contrary, whites are, at best, "only about half as likely to end up with faculty positions as are minority" applicants. Id. If Farber and Sherry are correct, it seems that we should set aside the radicals' suggestions about how to eliminate bias in faculty hiring and turn our attention to other forms of discrimination persisting in the legal academy.
27. Id. at 108-09 (briefly describing historian Hayden White's arguments concerning the interpretation of historical events).
28. Id. at 110.
29. Id. at 110-11.
30. Id. at 111.
31. Id. at 117.
32. See Richard Delgado, The Imperial Scholar Revisited: How To Marginalize Outsider Writing, Ten Years Later, 140 U. PENN. L. REV. 1349, 1349 (1992) (noting, with approval, that Derrick Bell characterized Delgado's predecessor article as "an intellectual hand grenade, tossed over the wall of the establishment as a form of academic protest")
33. (citing Jon Wiener, Law Profs Fight the Power, 249 NATION 246, 246 (1989)).
34. FARBER & SHERRY, supra note 2, at 112.
35. Id. at 113.
36. Id. at 112.
37. Id.
38. Id. at 112-13.
39. Id. at 113.
40. Id. at 116.
41. Id.
42. Id. at 114.
43. Id.
44. Id. at 113.
45. Id.
46. Id. at 113, 116-17.
47. Id. at 116.
48. Id.