“Law Matters”
20″ h x 20″ w, archival print (signed, numbered 611/1000) (2017)
People in the art world are generally interested when I tell them that my day job is constitutional law professor, but that interest is increasingly cut with pity. What is the point of what I do, when the Constitution seems to be on fire, with the match struck by the very men and women who stand at the center of law’s citadel?
“Law Matters” was created in 2017, at the onset of Trump’s first term, and I copies of the print were sent to law schools around the country (the original was installed at Texas A&M Law School), and this example was gifted to me by an administrator at Lewis & Clark a few years after I began teaching there. It now graces my office wall, with a message that simultaneously feels more hollow and more essential with each passing year.
How can both be true? How can I simultaneously be losing faith that law practically constrains anyone, and also believe even more fervently that the values of the law are crucial to restoring the grace of the American project?
One of my favorite passages in legal scholarship was written in 1987 by the great Critical Race Theory pioneer Patricia Williams. She was responding to a group of leftist legal scholars who had been “trashing” the idea of “rights”, contending that our entire discourse of constitutional rights was a false promise that mostly acted to obscure the fundamental machinations of power that kept the people on top, on top, and the rest of us on the bottom.
Williams was no Pollyanna. She was well aware of the gap between what rights have promised and what rights have delivered. She admitted that “To say that blacks never fully believed in rights is true.” However, she continued, “it is also true that blacks believed in them so much and so hard that we gave them life where there was none before.”
We held onto them, put the hope of them into our wombs, and mothered them-not just the notion of them. We nurtured rights and gave rights life. And this was not the dry process of reification, from which life is drained and reality fades as the cement of conceptual determinism hardens round-but its opposite. This was the resurrection of life from 400-year-old ashes; the parthenogenesis of unfertilized hope.
Law matters not because law, on its own, serves as some guarantee of liberty or guardian against injustice. Law matters if we make it matter, if we make law’s reality one that lives up to the dry promise of words on a page and burst with the life and hope of millions of Americans who retained faith that the constitution’s promissory note shall be honored.
David Schraub 