lawrence m. friedman in interview continental law professors and continental historians. And the continental law professors presented papers that said things like ‘The family law draft of Austria of 1792 was modified in 1798 by blah blah blah.’ The historians, on the other hand, would talk about divorce records. They would talk about the law in action. They were much more interesting. The legal historians, the ones who defined themselves as legal historians, were only interested in doctrine. This draft and that draft, and never asking what difference did any of this make. To be frank, hardly at all. I had some political sympathy with their goals, but they tended to be non-empirical and very normative, and it didn’t interest me particularly. Also it was a movement within the academy – it was about legal education and so on – and frankly I was never that concerned with all of that. I was just doing my own thing. I’m not proud of that necessarily, but that’s the way I am. Yes, and it was replaced by subgroups like critical race theory and critical feminist theory and so on. Again, I have sympathy with the goals, but a lot of it is jargon and kind of highly theoretical. Wewerevery good friends andwe worked togetheronanumber of projects. We were lifelong friends. He was a remarkable person. He was very, very original in his scholarship. He published an article in 1954 on the authority of authority in which he counted citations in the opinions of 10 ‘Critical Legal Studies Symposium’, Stanford Law Review36/1 (1984). 11 Pierre Legrand, ‘John Henry Merryman and Comparative Legal Studies: ADialogue’, American Journal of Comparative Law47 (1999), 3. 113 From a European perspective I would say that American legal science in the post-war period was very attractive. First the alternative schools in law and society, but then also the critical legal studies movement.10 How did the CLS movement affect you? But the CLS movement faded out. At the law faculty you got to know John Merryman, the comparatist. What was your relation to John?11
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