By Duncan Kennedy

In this lecture, I offer an intellectual historical narrative of debates about the role of social justice in legal education in the United States from around 1900 to the present. I would be surprised (not unpleasantly) if Sir Elwyn Jones had ever turned his attention to this topic. Nonetheless, my hope is that this lecture would have interested him. The struggle for social justice in which he was a deeply committed participant was, in his time and today, an international affair, and also a project that crosses the boundaries of institutions, coming to bear within the bar and in the legislature, as well as on shop floors and, emphatically, in educational institutions. But whatever Sir Elwyn would have thought about it, I hope it will be of some, however limited, use to those of you who are contemplating the creation of a law faculty at the University of Wales at Bangor.

I have some knowledge of British law faculties, although only of English ones and only relatively recent knowledge of those; I cannot claim enough knowledge to say anything about British legal education, and I can say even less about what Welsh legal education actually looks like today or might look like as developed in a new law faculty. That is the reason I have chosen a topic over which I hope I can assert confident ownership. It would be wonderful (although it seems unlikely) if in the question period, someone should say, “Well, I think you have it completely wrong about what happened in American legal education in the 1920s.”

The notion that there is a special category of justice called “social justice” is a late 19th century and early 20th century idea. People didn’t talk about social justice in the 18th century. The term is associated with the development of intense conflict between social classes all over the industrializing world at the end of the 19th century; its primary reference was originally to the idea of justice between a proletariat and “owning” classes, whether aristocratic, large land-owning, or bourgeois.