Garbage-Mouth
![handle is hein.journals/lsociq21 and id is 1011 raw text is: Garbage-Mouth
Laura Kalman
I am often called a garbage-mouth, and with good reason. Unlike
John Henry Schlegel,1 I was not taught to swear by truckers. Rather, my
classmates at Westlake School for Girls inculcated me into the joys of
talkin' dirty. The profanity of 15-year-olds, whose biggest problem was
what car we would receive on our birthday, surely sounds different from that
of teamsters. As I recall, the f-word, our favorite phrase, was uttered in
overly casual fashion and as frequently as possible. When we canceled the
session in which seniors learned how to choose china patterns, on grounds
of irrelevance, perhaps we were not pledging lifelong allegiance to feminism
so much as being naughty another time. Yet even if I were certain the only
effect of high school was to leave me with a passion for profanity and paper
plates, that is still an impact. Style matters.
In The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism,2 I charted the flowering of
law and, as interdisciplinarity became trendy among law professors. Page
after page describes their forays into other disciplines-notably philosophy,
economics, literary theory, and history. These adventures and misadven-
tures, I suggest, have resulted in a change in law professors' style, evident in
the discourse of constitutional theory:
What was new about the republicanism debate was that law
professors who participated in it seemed to be talking historians' schol-
arship seriously. Whereas once they cited [Bernard] Bailyn and
[Gordon] Wood's history textbook to make the 'case that the Framers
of the Constitution expected that all political action would reflect a
concern for the common good,' they were now turning to Bailyn and
Laura Kalman is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
She thanks W. Randall Garr and John Henry Schlegel for their help with this response.
1. John Henry Schlegel, Talkin' Dirty: Twining's Tower and Kalman's Strange Career,
21 Law & Soc'y Rev. 981 (1996).
2. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996 (Kalman, Strange Career).
3. Arthur Leff, Law and, 87 Yale L.. 989 (1978).
© 1997 American Bar Foundation.
0897-654619612104-1001$01.00 1001](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lsociq21&div=46&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
What Is HeinOnline?
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most
Garbage-Mouth
Contact us for annual subscription options:
Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?
profiles profiles most