May 31, 2011
The
University of Michigan recently announced the acquisition of
Professor
Lawrence Joseph’s literary, professional and personal papers.
Professor Joseph’s archive “illustrates the unusual combination of
literary talent and legal scholar in one person,” said Peggy Daub,
Director of the University’s Special Collections Library. The
archive will be transferred to U-M’s Hatcher
Graduate Library in segments over the next two years, and is
expected to be open for use by scholars by 2013. “It is a great
privilege for me to have my papers housed in a Special Collection
in one of the outstanding libraries in the world, at the University
that has so much influenced my life,” Professor Joseph
said.
A Detroit native, Professor Joseph studied literature as an
undergraduate at the University of Michigan, where he received a
major writing award for his poetry and was named a Power Fellow to
Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. He earned his JD from
U-M in 1975. In 1981, after completing a clerkship and teaching at
University of Detroit Law School, he moved to New York City, where
he practiced law at the international firm of Shearman &
Sterling LLP. Since joining the St. John’s faculty in 1987,
Professor Joseph has taught Torts (which he has taught every year
and is the course by which most St. John’s alumni and students know
him), Employment Law, Law and Interpretation, Torts Seminar, and
Jurisprudence, and has written and lectured widely on these
subjects. He was named the Law School’s Reverend Joseph T.
Tinnelly, C.M. Professor of Law in 2003.
Professor Joseph has been recognized as a leading legal scholar in
areas of jurisprudence, law and interpretation, and law and
literature, demonstrated by both his law review and his literary
writings. He is the author of five books of poetry, and Lawyerland,
a book of prose. Two major symposia, “The Lawyerland Essays”
(Vol.101, Columbia Law Review, November 2001) and “Some Sort of
Chronicler I Am: Narration and the Poetry of Lawrence Joseph” (Vol.
77, Cincinnati Law Review, Spring 2009) feature his work. Professor
Joseph’s latest book, The Game Changed: Essays and Other
Prose, will be published by the University of Michigan Press
in 2011.
At the invitation of Dean William M. Treanor, Professor Joseph was
the featured speaker at Georgetown University Law Center’s recent
Spring Scholarship Luncheon. Celebrating scholarly writings by
the school’s law faculty, the luncheon is a major event attended by
the entire faculty. In his talk, “Some Thoughts on Scholarship
Involving Law and Language,” Professor Joseph observed: “During the
last 40 years, legal scholars have vigorously and intensely, and
with great critical sophistication explored issues of language. For
me, the most essential and critical jurisprudential question is
‘what is law?’ What we as legal scholars now know—no matter what
form or critical viewpoint that our scholarship takes—is that law
is at least a language. It is a language which, critically, now
includes languages of politics, of social theory, of economics, of
literature, history, philosophy, and, in a broad sense, the
language of interpretation and interpretive theory. We’re all law
and language legal scholars now. “
“The University of Michigan’s acquisition of his papers is an apt
honor for Professor Joseph, who has a unique ability to
thoughtfully consider and meld the complex worlds of law and
poetry,” said Dean
Michael A. Simons. “Lawyers and poets both work their craft
with language. In some ways, all lawyers are poets, and Professor
Joseph’s work makes that link explicit. By exploring law through
poetry, he illuminates the poetry in law.”