Bruner at the Bar: Jerome Bruner's Influence on Law and the Legal Academy
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Description
In this section we present three essays and a play written by colleagues of Jerry at New York University School of Law, where Jerry taught from 1991 until he retired as emeritus in 2013. Jerry came to NYU Law School in 1991 as the visiting Meyer Professor. This professorship was reserved for distinguished scholars who were not lawyers and who promised to enrich the study of law. The Law School had in mind that Jerry, as Meyer Professor, would collaborate with Professors Anthony Amsterdam, Peggy Davis and others in constructing the theory of lawyering as an interactive, sympathetic, personal engagement between lawyer and client. Jerry’s year as Meyer Professor was indeed inventive and productive. Jerry helped to construct the Colloquium on the Theory of Legal Practice, which drew upon insights from psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and literary theory. Thereafter, Jerry was appointed Research Professor at NYU Law School and University Professor at New York University. As University Professor he could choose his academic “home,” and he chose the Law School, concerned that the study of psychology had become increasingly descriptive, and being attracted to the law’s normative possibilities. Thus, Jerry’s third academic career, after Harvard and Oxford. Jerry had a great impact on NYU and, in particular, on a coterie of colleagues and students and on pedagogy in areas close to his heart—criminal justice, including death penalty and prisons, poverty, inequality, and culture and its meanings. His work on narrative and his essential contributions to the dilemmas of what is fact, what is intent, what is mind, and what is evil found resonance in the classroom. Moreover, his love of people and his caring for each and every one of his students produced hundreds of law graduates in his thrall. Jerry’s closest law faculty colleagues include the four who have written the essays and play that follow. Jerry co-taught the lawyering theory colloquium with Tony Amsterdam and Peggy Davis. For almost two decades, he co-taught Culture and the Law with Oscar Chase and Vengeance and the Law with Tony Amsterdam. His intellectual companionship with David Garland, one of the world’s leading law, sociology and criminology scholars, spanned the years from the early 1990s after NYU recruited him from the University of Edinburgh.
Source Publication
Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100: Cultivating Possibilities
Source Editors/Authors
Giuseppina Marsico
Publication Date
2015
Recommended Citation
Fox, Eleanor M., "Bruner at the Bar: Jerome Bruner's Influence on Law and the Legal Academy" (2015). Faculty Chapters. 1118.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1118
