Reply to Richard Harvey Brown

the domain of Natural or Divine Law and made a useful tool by which social change could be amicably and rationally effectuated is the question legal history should seek to explain. Lawyers working through to accomplish justice in society, and in itself, is what the enterprise is all about; and I am committed to it because I personally think it can be the means of accomplishing a better worldthough it has never been in the past. I believe that as a student of our legal history. And, as a modern lawyer, I wish and believe it for our future. I want my students, colleagues, and contemporaries to work, through law, to make it so. Hence, my optimism-which contrasts so sharply with Mr. Brown's pessimism. I thoroughly agree with him that our legal system is full of abuses and injustices. Still, a world with is better than one without; and schools have made law a subject that can be examined, studied, and thought about in a university setting. That is a plus-for the university is, or may be, the site of much of the best serious thinking in our society. Law should, notwithstanding the common-law tradition, be taught and learned in such an environment. I suspect that modern American differs materially from our own of yesterday precisely because it has been subjected to academic (as well as practical) scrutiny. But I may be wrong in interpreting and its history as I do. To me, history is interpretation: trying to give meaning, sense, purpose to the jumbled confusion of facts which clutter every day. And I, like an artist, feel it my duty to stress what I think deserves stress in primary colors. By so doing, the remainder necessarily pales. I stand guilty as charged of neglecting some aspects and emphasizing others -of using warm colors where others would use cold ones. But that is the nature of my kind of history.