Those of us who stay for Torts with Professor Rapaczynski immediately after Prof. Moglen’s class were yesterday treated to apparently diametrically opposed visions of freedom and autonomy. After Moglen’s passionate lecture on the libertarian impulse’s responsibility for the national predicament, we were treated to a reasoned and logical explanation as to why, in order to promote freedom and autonomy, we must not punish someone who shrugs his shoulders while watching a child drown at his feet.

• Are you sure that's what I said yesterday? I don't think I was addressing libertarianism any more than I was addressing spiritual pride. (Perhaps one is a version of the other?)

What is going on here? Rapaczynski is not a heartless man, and while Moglen is at odds with the university, he is not at war with it.

• This is an odd juxtaposition, with no analytical benefit to the reader, so far as I can see. My beef with law school as presently conducted is that it does not serve the intended purpose of making people into more creative, happier and more socially effective lawyers. I say that law school does not do law schooling well, which is indeed not about saying that the university primarily produces oppression. But why I believe law school should be fundamentally changed in order to achieve adequately its professed purpose does not capture the essence either of what I said yesterday or of what differentiates me from Andrzej psychologically and politically.

I think as we examine our status as winners of a global lottery we should not ignore the contours of the various different lotteries we have won. If you grow up in Warsaw in the 50s (privileged though you may be) you will be more skeptical of communal solutions, because you will have seen communal failure. Growing up in the US, a rebellious mind will turn on capitalism. Both views are "right," (something can be done with each) because both are essentially negations – both states are oppressive, because it is in the nature of states to oppress.

• Andrzej's background and its effect on his thought is more complex than this account suggests. Neither the man who wrote about Jean Bodin, nor the one who enthusiastically taught von Treitschke and Joseph de Maistre, was anti-statist. What causes one not to save the drowning is not necessarily heartlessness.

Our own backgrounds compel us to create our own myths, many of them born of a critical view of where we were raised. Theodor’s family history in the DDR compels him to write that the Stasi are the progeny of the Gestapo, when in fact Nazi officers were prosecuted far more vigorously in the East than in the West (the Stasi were no saints but were in fact modeled on the MGB). I, meanwhile, can’t read about the 323 executions (more than half of which took place in one year, and 60 of which were executions of Nazi officers) and the writers who lost their jobs when they refused to conform to party ideals without thinking that the US has executed more than three times that many since 1976, and that as a nation we are no stranger to silencing writers for their political views.

We should, I think, try to be aware of our personal myths, born of personal backgrounds, as we proceed. We have an opportunity (maybe even a responsibility) to overthrow the old myths, but as we do so I worry that we will replace them with myths and folklore of our own.

• Robespierre seems to me again a peculiar place to begin. The difference between what Robespierre (or Talleyrand, just so we don't think ideology has anything to do with it) are up to in the fete de la Federation or other acts of public drama is what Thurman Arnold is also up to, and what, Arnold would say, all effort to deal with organized society is always up to. So the conclusion is only an assertion, and to say of lawyering that it worries you is probably not enough of a response.

-- AndrewCase - 11 Feb 2009