You know as students we had very little awareness of these various movements in the legal academy. We were just interested in getting grades and so on. Many of the teachers at Chicago were very old-fashioned teachers, who taught through old-fashioned methods and with old-fashioned content. But there were some exceptions to that. And I think Chicago was one of the schools in which there were these exceptions. There was an anthropologist named Robert Redfield [1897–1958] who taught a course in anthropology and law, and in the law school itself there was Max Rheinstein [1899–1977] for example, who had a real interest in family law and wills, and was much less of a doctrinist and more of a realist, and also really a warm and friendly person and much beloved by the students. And I stayed on for a Master’s degree at Chicago, and he was my faculty adviser. Yes, he introduced Weber into American legal sociology and American legal thought in general, because he was one of the translators of Weber’s work. I’m not sure he wasn’t the sole translator, but he did work on the translation of the book now called Max Weber on Law in Economy and Society. The English translation was published in 1954. As I tell my class, I was in the seminar Rheinstein gave, but more importantly in some sense I had a job that was relevant to this publication. I needed money, and I was a quite skilled typist: I typed the manuscript. I think Rheinstein was Weber’s student. So I like to tell my students I have a connection to Weber, but of a Bertolt Brecht type. Brecht said in a poem something like ‘The king said, he built the palace, but did he build it? Did he put the bricks together?’ and so on.3 I typed the manuscript, and put my labour into it. But I also took Rheinstein’s seminar. lawrence m. friedman in interview 3 Bertolt Brecht, Questions from a Worker Who Reads (1935). 105 This is interesting, because you took your law degree at Chicago in the late 1940s. Didn’t the legal realist movement peak at that time? Wasn’t he the man who introduced Weber to American legal scholars?
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