Notes from the Editorial Advisory Board

My classmates Jim Tourtelott, Joe Sommer, and Eva Saks invented the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities at a Mexican restaurant one night in the fall of 1987. When they announced their idea to me the next day, my first thought was: "Great, now there can be a place to publish the things I want to write." How greedy, and (to say the same thing in a different way) how abject! My reaction reflects not a sense of marginality or deviance (both of these always being tinged with an adventurous self-confidence that was quite absent from my attitude at that moment), but rather a sense of isolation. I could not have had this bland reaction to the proposed oasis unless I had accepted it as a given that my most urgent projects on the Law and Humanities borderline were mine alone.

But the idea of the Journal swept through the law school and various graduate departments on a wave of excitement. Clearly I had not been alone and would not be able to imagine myself as isolated again.