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65 S. Cal. L. Rev. 2231 (1991-1992)
The Word and the River: Pedagogy as Scholarship as Struggle

handle is hein.journals/scal65 and id is 2249 raw text is: THE WORD AND THE RIVER: PEDAGOGY AS SCHOLARSHIP AS STRUGGLE* CHARLES R. LAWRENCE, III** I. PROLOGUE: AN UNTRANSLATED DREAM' ABOUT THE WORD I am sitting in a room. On the other side of the room a man and a woman sit at a small table. The room is large, stark, and empty except for the chairs in which its occupants sit and the table. The man and the woman are talking. They are talking about me. They talk as if I were not there, although both are obviously aware of my presence. The man is white, balding, bearded. I do not recognize him, but I know he is a colleague at the prestigious law school where I have been teaching as a visiting professor. He is sitting in the far comer of the * @1992 Charles R. Lawrence, III. All rights reserved. ** Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, Stanford University. B.A. 1965, Haverford Col- lege; J.D. 1969, Yale Law School. The author thanks the Yale and Stanford law schools, where initial versions of this paper were presented. Special thanks go to Barbara Babcock, Derrick Bell, Thomas Grey, Mari Matsuda, Frank Michelman, and Blanca Silvestrini for reading and comment- ing on earlier drafts. Expert research assistance was provided by Rhonda Reaves, Mark Niles, Antoinette Carter, Veronica Gentilli, Elizabeth Newman, Robyn Manos, Dianne Trunk, and Chad Atkins. 1. This narrative first appeared as Charles R. Lawrence, III, A Dream: On Discovering the Significance of Fear, 10 NOVA L.J. 627 (1986). In it I record, to the best of my ability, an actual dream I had in 1981 when I was on the faculty of the University of San Francisco Law School and was a visiting professor at Boalt Law School. When I awoke, I went immediately to my typewriter and tried to put the dream down exactly as I had dreamed it. I read it through twice and put it aside, deciding that it was too personal and perhaps too provocative to share. Five years later, when the Nova Law Journal asked me to contribute to a volume entitled Transforming Legal Education: A Symposium of Provocative Thought, I remembered the dream and, after considerable searching, found my discarded draft beneath one of the piles of paper on my office shelves. I showed it to a couple of friends, who wisely counseled me to keep it in mothballs. Who knows. You might want to teach at one of those prestigious law schools one day, they cautioned. Perhaps you could edit it to make it more abstract and theoretical-less concrete and personal. Obviously I gave their wisdom little heed. The dream, and Roberto Unger's Passion, through which I had recently struggled, counseled a different wisdom. I have edited the original draft only minimally, choosing to sacrifice what might have been gained in stylistic refinement in order to preserve the chronology and feel of the dream. 2231

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