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The universal spirit of Laws, in all countries is to favor the strong in opposition to the weak, and to assist those who have possessions against those who have none. This inconveniency is inevitable, and without exception.
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1762)
The “Haves” paper was written in a different age. Its core was composed in the fall of 1970 when I was a fellow at the Yale Law School's remarkably fruitful soft-money Program in Law and Modernization. This was before the ascent of law and economics, before the emergence of critical legal studies and its progeny, before the promotion of alternative dispute resolution, before the arrival of the new legal journalism and the informational opening of legal world in 1979. The Law and Society Association, founded in 1964, was largely a support group dedicated to publishing the Law & Society Review (then in volume 5) and had not yet held a national meeting.
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- Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 4: Do the “Haves” Still Come Out Ahead? , 1999 , pp. 1113 - 1123
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- Copyright © 1999 by the Law and Society Association
Footnotes
This piece is a revised version of my remarks at the conference on “Do the ‘Haves’ Still Come Out Ahead” held at the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin, 1-2 May 1998. I want to express my gratitude to Joel Grossman, who had the idea of doing something for the 25th birthday of the “Haves” paper; to Stewart Macaulay, Bert Kritzer, and Peter Carstensen, who joined him in organizing the event; to Joy Roberts and the institute staff for arrangements; and to the participants who made it a most singular and stimulating occasion. I would also like to take this occasion to mention my teachers Max Rheinstein and Karl Llewellyn who, I continually discover, anticipated many of the things I have managed to say, including the term haves, which Llewellyn used as long ago as 1933. He was not the first; the Oxford English Dictionary traces the term to 1836. Finally, I would like to salute my wife, Eve, whose experience in the consumer movement was the vivid example that brought these questions home to me, literally.
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