Leslie Kendrick ‘06
Vice Dean of UVA Law
Dicta features overviews of, musings about, and recent developments in Law School professors’ scholarship, as well as their views about current events and happenings in the law. The Law Weekly is excited to reintroduce Dicta and hopes that it will provide an outlet for professors to share their research and reflections with the Law School community.
Professors interested in submitting a piece are invited to contact the Professor Liaison Editor, Leah Deskins (lcd4ew@virginia.edu).
In early January, I gave a talk at the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting. The AALS Annual Meeting is a large annual gathering of law teachers, librarians, and administrators from across the U.S. and the world. It includes many sessions on a vast array of legal specialties.
This year, the AALS Torts and Jurisprudence sections partnered to host a panel celebrating the life of John Gardner, a Scottish lawyer and legal philosopher who tragically died of cancer in 2019 at age fifty-four. John spent most of his career at the University of Oxford, where for more than fifteen years he was Professor of Jurisprudence, a chair previously held by H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin. At his passing, he left behind a rich body of work on criminal law, private law, and legal philosophy, as well as a bereaved transatlantic community of lawyers and philosophers.
I knew John Gardner only a bit, but I have known him by reputation for more than twenty years. I was studying literature at Oxford when John took over the Jurisprudence chair from Ronald Dworkin. One of my best friends had John as her supervisor, and she said often that he was as kind as he was brilliant.
The AALS panel focused on the last book John published before his passing, From Personal Life to Private Law (Oxford University Press 2018). (An essay collection, Torts and Other Wrongs, was published posthumously.)
In From Personal Life to Private Law, John argued that private law, particularly tort law and contract law, involves problems and resolutions familiar from our personal lives. In doing so, he drew on a rich array of examples from both life and literature to elucidate intuitions about law and morality.
At the AALS panel, I compared John’s arguments in From Personal Life to Private Law with his stance on strict liability elsewhere. In other work, John defends strict liability as consistent with fair-notice values and acceptable within a private-law framework. These arguments square well with From Personal Life to Private Law, yet the book mentions strict liability only once. Instead it focuses entirely on the fault standard as paradigmatic of private law. This seems to me a missed opportunity, especially given John’s focus on analogies from literature. From Greek tragedies onward, literature has many examples of figures who are held responsible on what amounts to a “strict liability” basis for actions or failures that they could not have known would have the grave consequences they do. John would have said interesting things about this, and it is our loss that he is not here to say more.
When I planned with the Law Weekly to write this piece, I was going to say more about torts. But in preparing for and attending the panel, I started to think about other, bigger principles from John’s work and life, principles that I try to remember and that might resonate for you:
Life is short: The world lost John Gardner too soon. None of us knows how much time we have here. What do we want to accomplish? How do we want to help repair the world? These are questions not for later but for now.
Relationships matter: Life is still long enough to make lasting relationships. John touched so many students and colleagues. The AALS panel involved friends I have been lucky to meet over twenty years, including one from Oxford, a co-author, and our dear Kim Ferzan. The colleagues you have now will be your friends for the rest of your lives. Your relationships will make your work lighter and your life richer. Take time to sustain them.
Your reputation precedes you: I heard what a good person John Gardner was long before I met him. Hearing that such an accomplished person was also kind had a small but real effect on my perceptions of the legal profession. In addition to the relationships you have, you can affect and inspire people you never even meet.
Life and law are connected: John’s book starts with a conviction that the problems and solutions in law reflect those of life. Law as a profession is not rote performance. It requires creativity, care, and critical thinking. Law school is a chance not only to learn rules but also to reflect. Take the chance. Find what you love or what you love enough to want to change. Learn about it, talk about it with your friends, make it part of what you live and breathe.
This is what I took away from celebrating the life of a wise man. Find your work, find your people. Nourish them, and carry them with you. They will carry you beyond the people you meet, even beyond the span of a lifetime.
Thank you to Christina Luk ’21, Leah Deskins ’21, and the Law Weekly staff for bringing back DICTA and for including this contribution.
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kendrick@law.virginia.edu