Harvard Professor Mark Tushnet Remembers Robert “Bobby” Lipkin, 2010
Transcript:
“Good afternoon. I’m pleased to be able to participate through the wonders of modern technology in this celebration of the life and work of Bobby Lipkin.”
“I know Bobby – knew Bobby – through his work initially and then by meeting him at a number of conferences and other semi-social occasions.”
“I found his work on dedicated and deliberative cultures extremely valuable in thinking about issues of multiculturalism in the modern U.S. Constitution and elsewhere, and I always enjoyed reading what he was producing, but as you will know from your experience, Bobby was a lot more than a scholar. He was a wonderful person to be with. Again, meeting him at conferences and outside conferences, I was always impressed with his combination of intense seriousness, openness to discussion, and modesty about what he was bringing to the table – always more than he was willing to acknowledge. It’s a great combination that you don’t find in many scholars these days.”
“It is of course quite sad that we have to talk about Bobby’s work as a closed body of scholarship, but what he gave to us – and to you at the law school even more than the general scholarly community will remain with us as something to be emulated by all of us.”
“Again, I wish I could be with you today to celebrate Bobby, but I hope that this is a sufficient to indicate how highly I regarded him and how serious I think his loss is.”
[Tribute was part of A Celebration of Scholarship with the Presentation of The Widener Law Review Special Edition in honor of Robert J. Lipkin took place on Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at noon in the Barrister's Club.]
The idea of “the burdens of judgment” in the subtitle of this weblog can be understood in this way: Reasonable disagreement–disagreement that is not resolvable by attending to an intersubjectively provable mistake by one of the parties–is caused by the burdens of judgment which consist of the following: (1) the complexity of empirical factors relevant to judgment; (2) the difference in weight given to the various empirical factors agreed upon as authentic; (3) the indeterminacy associated with the central concepts in political debate and consequently, the need for interpretation and theories of interpretation; (4) the important differences in life experiences and the effects these differences have on reasoning and judgments; (5) differences in various kinds of normative factors with concomitant differences in the normative force that generate different judgments; and (6) the difficulty in selecting the appropriate subset of values from society’s actual set of “cherished” or fundamental values.[1]
can achieve provisional closure to hot-button debates among moral and political equals. But a republican democrat realizes that sometimes, many times perhaps, even provisional closure is elusive. In such circumstances, one should not retreat within the inner recesses of one’s substantive positions–whether it is libertarianism or Marxism, for example–rather one’s needs to subject one’s substantive position to the reflective criticism of others and acknowledge how unlikely it is for one’s substantive position to emerge from such deliberative debate unchanged in significant ways. Imagining that it can illustrates a failure to appreciate the significance of the burdens of judgment.
