Divided Law Faculty Finishes a Chapter

More than a month ago President Derek C. Bok appointed the outspoken Robert C. Clark as Law School dean, saying that it was time for the divided faculty to put aside its political differences and concentrate on other academic issues.

This week, the faculty made its first tenure decisions in at least three years, unanimously approving offers for Assistant Professors of Law Randall Kennedy and Kathleen M. Sullivan. Although those tenure bids do not necessarily mark the end of the school's ideological controversy, they at least mark the end of its most recent chapter.

Kennedy and Sullivan--whose tenure offers await only the formal approval of the governing boards--were the last of the group of young professors whose presence on the law faculty eventually resulted in a stalled tenure process.

In the early 1980s, the Law School recruited a group of young assistant professors--affectionately called the "shrimps"--who stood apart from the faculty in their backgrounds. The "shrimps" were more diverse than the faculty--there were three women and one Black--and they were generally more liberal than their colleagues.

Three of them were adherents to the radical school of legal scholarship, Critcal Legal Studies (CLS), which holds that the law is an instrument of social injustice. CLS has divided the academic community, and many right-wing professors nationwide have pushed to keep CLS professors off of law faculties.

At Harvard, two CLS tenure-tracked professors were denied lifetime posts in highly controversial votes after Bok intervened. Many observers said they thought he was biased against the left-wing scholars, and they interpreted the appointment of Clark as yet another political message from the president.

Neither Kennedy nor Sullivan are considered "shrimps" themselves. They are not CLS adherents, and their scholarship didn't raise such questions of ideology.

Kennedy's work on capital punishment and discrimination is certainly left-leaning, but not ideologically controversial. Sullivan's scholarship is already considered on a par with the nation's most established constitutional law professors.

"Nobody was surprised," Professor of Law Philip B. Heymann said. "The enthusiasm is absolutely palpable."

Yet their tenure approvals Wednesday--even if uncontroversial--set the tenure process back in motion after a three-year hiatus.

As Professor of Law Derrick A. Bell said, "The turning down of two or three people was a very traumatic and divisive happening. It's not the natural order of things here. So an occasion when two people gain unanimous support across ideological lines is a particularly welcome event after trauma."

And Clark--whose commitment to minority faculty hiring has been questioned--noted that the appointments of the school's third Black and sixth woman "gave me a good head start" on improving gender and racial diversity on the faculty.

Left-wing scholars still question the wisdom of Clark's appointment, and the ideological rift in the faculty is not yet resolved.

But with Dean James Vorenberg '49 about to step down, and all the "shrimps" either tenured or at different schools, the law faculty may be ready to fulfill Bok's mandate, looking beyond political divisions to other matters of education and policy.