part ii • legal cultures • kjell å modéer Actually, weather was a big reason. I gave up something when I left Wisconsin. I gave up a good cohort of people who I liked to work with. And what I got for it was weather – and much better food. I mean in those times Wisconsin was not a gourmet capital, not that I’m a gourmet, but I do like Chinese food. Really, weather and good food were big reasons. I had never been to California. You must understand that. I grew up in Chicago, and we travelled very little when I was young. I think visiting at Stanford was the first time I had been to California. And I saw palm trees. I thought this is like heaven. Imagine, palm trees! And mountains. Chicago was totally flat. Wisconsin has some nice hills, but to see real mountains, and palm trees? I thought this is living! Oh, there was, but to be honest I didn’t pay attention to that. But the palm tree, that was really something! I went to a meeting in Hawaii once. There I sawMarc Galanter for the first time in many years. He had been a friend of my wife at college and I knew him slightly. He was on his honeymoon actually. And I talked him – he would admit this – into the law and society idea. There we were, in Hawaii. Imagine coming from the AmericanMidwest and getting off the plane in Hawaii. The warmth, the flowers, the palm trees. You’re from Sweden; you must understand this. Well maybe, but I don’t remember any connection. I wrote an article in 1969 in which I introduced the concept of legal culture. I’m not saying that nobody had used the phrase before, but I was inspired by the fact 110 And then you left Wisconsin for Stanford. Was it because of the weather? But wasn’t there also a new generation of scholars who were recruited to Stanford at that time? Well, I agree. It’s like coming to the edge of the world to come to San Francisco and Stanford. In the late 1960s you formulated your scholarly programme of legal culture. Can you tell me how that happened? Was it just a coincidence that it came at the time of the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964? I did. Yes, I did. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I did.
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