The Legal Imagination and the Protestant (Dis) Establishment

Abstract

The Legal Imagination is a quintessentially liberal imagination–or, to borrow Trilling’s term, The Liberal Imagination.  As such it is intimately related to what once was widely referred to as the Liberal Establishment, otherwise known as the Eastern Establishment or, more significantly, the Protestant Establishment.  In this essay, I take seriously the Protestant dimension and the intellectual dimension of “the Establishment” and the broader Protestant intellectual culture of which, I argue, White’s book is a part.  I locate the book in the transformations that were taking place in American intellectual and political culture in the turbulent years of its birth (the 1960s and early 1970s), and in the longer history of religious disestablishment and of liberal Protestantism’s battles with non-mainline Protestantism, on the one hand, and Catholicism, on the other.  Focusing on a pivotal event that took place on the Cambridge Common, whose phantom hovers entre les lignes of one of the readings that appears in the book—an anti-war protest that turned violent—this essay considers the extent to which the conservative legal movement has been shaped by the conservative attack on the liberal establishment that emerged in this time period, in particular, conservative Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant attacks on the liberal establishment and on the liberal (Protestant) imagination so beautifully rendered in James Boyd White’s instructional book.

Keywords: law and literature, disestablishment, liberal Protestantism, Clarence Thomas, liberalism, conservatism, James Boyd White, secularism