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45 St. Louis U. L.J. 791 (2001)
Cases in Context: Lake Champlain Wars, Gentrification and Ploof v. Putnam

handle is hein.journals/stlulj45 and id is 813 raw text is: CASES IN CONTEXT: LAKE CHAMPLAIN WARS, GENTRIFICATION AND PLOOF V. PUTNAM JOAN VOGEL* My first year of law school more than twenty years ago was a disturbing experience. Coming from graduate training in another discipline, legal anthropology, I was appalled by what often happened in my classes. Despite the reputation law training had for rigorous analysis, many of my professors made statements about human behavior with little or no empirical foundation, failed to examine many of their assumptions that underlay doctrinal statements and provided little or no social context for many of the cases we read or studied in class. Needless to say, they almost never talked about issues of race, gender, and especially social class, even when those issues literally jumped out of the cases.' Although legal pedagogy has changed significantly in the last twenty years, many of the first-year casebooks, especially in tort law, which I teach, still tend to present acontextual discussions2 of cases with little or no historical or social background information. Often, the casebook authors will reserve the most interesting information about the cases for the teacher's manual, which the law professor can use or ignore.3 Fortunately, in recent years, a number of law professors have researched the social and historical * Professor of Law, Vermont Law School. Many Vermont historians and Vermont Law School students helped me research this paper. I would especially like to thank Peter Gilles, Robert Weiss, Kay Teetor, Kevin Dann, Susan Brande Price and Nancy Gallagher for their invaluable assistance. I am especially grateful to Kevin Dann, a local Vermont historian, for providing me with his original source material on the case and on the Ploofs. 1. One of the most vivid memories I have is from Criminal Procedure in my first year of law school. The professor was discussing a case, Davis v. Mississippi, 394 U.S. 721 (1969), in which the local police rounded up many of the young black men in town when a rape victim identified her attacker simply as a young black man. The professor only discussed the case in terms of the Fourth Amendment issue of whether the police could take fingerprints and didn't even mention the police round-up. When I raised my hand to ask about the round-up, he seemed surprised by the question. If I had not raised the issue, he would not have discussed it at all. 2. See Elizabeth Mertz, Linguistic Constructions of Difference and History in the U.S. Law School Classroom, in DEMOCRACY AND ETHNOGRAPHY: CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES IN MULTICULTURAL LIBERAL STATES 218, 218-32 (Carol Greenhouse ed., 1998). See also JOHN M. CONLEY & WILLIAM M. O'BARR, JUST WORDS: LAW, LANGUAGE, AND POWER 134 (1998). 3. Taunya Lovell Banks, Teaching Laws With Flaws: Adopting a Pluralistic Approach to Torts, 57 Mo. L. REv. 443, 447 (1992).

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