Organizations, Institutions, and the Story of Shmuel: Reflections on the 40th Anniversary of the Law and Society Association

Today I would like to speak to you about Organizations, Institutions, and the Story of Shmuel. Now, I figure everyone here knows what an organization is, and pretty much everyone at least thinks they know what an institution is. But I'm pretty sure you all are wondering, "Who's Shmuel?" Shmuel was a Jewish fellow who was shipwrecked on a desert island. After he had lived many years by himself on the island, a rescue party located him. Before leaving the island, Shmuel offered to give his rescuers a tour. "You won't believe the good life I have had here," he told them. "This is the general store," he said, pointing out an area where fruits and nuts were attractively displayed on tables. "Each morning I come here and select the finest fresh produce for my breakfast." "This is the fitness center," he said, pointing to a workout area, where vines were strung up to create a ropes course and where there was a large oval track lined with shells. "And this is the synagogue where I pray each day," he said, taking them to a serene cul-de-sac, where there was an altar and a bench carved out of an old log. With that, he was ready to board ship and go home. But one of the rescuers stopped him to ask, "Shmuel-what about the building over there?" pointing to an intriguing structure that Shmuel had not mentioned. "Yeeech!" Shmuel exclaimed, with a disgusted look on his face. "That's the other synagogue. . . . No way would I set foot in there!" The story of Shmuel might apply to a professional organization I've been studying this past year. It was founded on November 17, 1964, by what could only be called a bunch of deviants and misfits-each of them had an academic affiliation in another discipline, but felt marginalized there. Following traditional research protocol, I will, of course, disguise the name of this organization. Let's just say it is a gardening club, and I'll refer to it as the "Lawn Society." Or maybe it's a folklore group-and we'll call it the "Lore and Society Association." OK, I've blown my cover. You have met the organization, and it is us. Our 40th anniversary is an opportune time to reflect on the Law and Society Association (LSA) as an institution, not just as an organization.1 Drawing on the insights of last year's Kalven Prize winner, Philip Selznick, I use the term institution to refer to the idea that organizations are more than formal structures that are set up to achieve specific goals. Rather, organizations are living entities with rich internal lives, and they develop values and commitments that exist quite apart from their formal purposes. Drawing on this concept, my comments today explore the institutional life of LSA. I examine the values and commitments of the Association, based on a perusal of documents, interviews with some of the founders, interviews with some current members, and very productive conversations with Laurie Edelman and Mark Suchman. It is also very much a personal statement, drawing on my own 37 years as part of LSA. By and large, the founders of LSA-a number of whom are with us this weekend-were people who were uncomfortable with the traditional image of law.2 Most particularly, the founders believed that empirical research could provide an understanding of how the legal system actually works, and of how law could become an effective agent of progressive social change. These ideas were hardly new, and owed much to the American legal realism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Karl Llewellyn, Jerome Frank, and Thurman Arnold; the sociological jurisprudence of Roscoe Pound; and the "living law" of the European scholar Eugen Ehrlich. By the early 1960s, a number of universities in the United States-including Wisconsin, Berkeley, Denver, Northwestern, and Yale-had interdisciplinary programs in law, with quite substantial funding from the Russell Sage Foundation and also from the Walter E. Meyer Foundation. In addition, by this time there was a growing literature on what we now call the "law in action," as well as an optimism that social scientific studies of law could influence legal outcomes. …