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Beyond Mirrors: Lawrence Friedman's Moving Pictures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Aviam Soifer
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Extract

“L'exactitude ce n'est pas la vérité.”

Henri Matisse, quoted in Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone 334 (New York, 1985)

“[A] legal system ... accommodates the equally exigent demands of being and meaning ... in a universe in which what a thing does is only one of the things that it means, but everything that it means is something else that it does.”

Arthur Leff, “Law and ...,” 87 Yale Law Journal 989 (1978)

Lawrence Friedman is a rare and remarkable phenomenon. He is a counter who thinks and a thinker who counts. He is aware of paradoxes such as the fact that “Everybody is an individual; everybody is also a conformist” (1985b: 102). More specifically, Friedman is particularly knowledgeable about the limitations and unpredictable consequences of efforts at legal reform. Yet, surprisingly, he seems somehow to be able to escape transforming his healthy skepticism into cynicism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 22 , Issue 5 , 1988 , pp. 995 - 1016
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

This essay was completed in the Fall of 1987. It is Lawrence Friedman's way to have published a half dozen or so articles since then, too late to be included in this discussion. The author thanks Daniel Offner for his research assistance and Kathy Abrams, Mary Dudziak, Chip Lupu, Martha Minow, David Seipp, Josephine Woll, Larry Yackle and, most particularly, Lance Cassak and Carol Weisbrod for reading drafts and discussing Lawrence Friedman's work with me.

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