{"id":9423,"date":"2008-06-04T20:11:30","date_gmt":"2008-06-05T01:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/ethicalesq\/2008\/06\/04\/halt-focuses-on-fred-rodell-you-sh"},"modified":"2011-08-05T14:53:26","modified_gmt":"2011-08-05T18:53:26","slug":"halt-focuses-on-fred-rodell-you-should-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ethicalesq\/2008\/06\/04\/halt-focuses-on-fred-rodell-you-should-too\/","title":{"rendered":"HALT focuses on Fred Rodell — you should, too"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> L<\/em><\/strong>ast February, the legal reform group HALT<\/a> unveiled a wonderful project to revive “the visionary legal reform lessons of Fred Rodell.” At that time, HALT launched<\/a> the FredRodell.com<\/a><\/em> website, along with its blandly-named The Law Blog<\/em><\/a>. Former Yale Law Professor Rodell, who died in 1980 at 73 years of age, spent decades trying to demystify the legal profession, which he compared to medicine men and high priests, and is considered the Father of the Plain English Movement.<\/p>\n

Steve Elias of Nolo.com posted HALT’s announcement in February at The Law Reform Soapbox<\/a><\/em> (Feb. 20, 2008); and Laura Orr pointed to it from her Oregon Legal Research<\/em><\/a> weblog at the end of March. Otherwise, the blawgisphere — including this weblog, which did not know about the Rodell Project until yesterday — has basically been mum about this fascinating legal gadfly. That’s too bad, because blawgers should feel a special kinship with Fred Rodell. As an obituary<\/a> noted, Rodell “prided himself on writing for lay audiences and teaching others to do so. . . . Many of his students are the leading legal journalists of today.”<\/p>\n

Here’s how the HALT announcement introduces Fred Rodell:<\/p>\n

“Sixty-nine years ago, a young Yale law professor rocked the legal establishment with a scathing indictment of the American civil justice system entitled Woe unto You, Lawyers!<\/em> Almost overnight Fred Rodell became the nation’s leading debunker of legal myths, and the target of untold ire from thin-skinned lawyers. And his provocative observations are as accurate today as they were seven decades ago.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They go on to say that “Rodell was a true pioneer of the legal reform movement, one of the first to identify the structural failures of our civil justice system and to stridently challenge the legal establishment. But since his death in 1980, his thinking has not received the serious consideration that it deserves, and his key writings have disappeared from print.” Thus,<\/p>\n

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“That is why we at HALT were so excited to begin working with San Francisco legal reform advocate Alex Kline and Fred Rodell’s family to revive these visionary legal reform lessons on the Internet.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That’s right: You could pay $45 to $93 dollars today for a used hard copy of Rodell’s out-of-print <\/em>masterpiece at the Amazon.com Marketplace<\/a>. But, thanks to HALT and Rodell’s family, you can now download “Woe Unto You, Lawyers”<\/a> and read it for free<\/em> in a 115-page PDF File. Likewise, Fred’s site offers access to his infamous law review article “Goodbye to Law Reviews<\/a>” 48 Va. L. Rev. 279 (1962). You will especially appreciate Rodell on law journals, if you’ve been enmeshed in the recent tiff over Harvard Law Review<\/em> standards; see, e.g<\/em>., Bernstein<\/a> at Volokh<\/em>; Lat<\/a> at Above the Law<\/em>; and Greenfield<\/a> at Simply Justice<\/em>). For a law review article about Rodell, see Prof. Ken Vinson’s “FRED RODELL’S CASE AGAINST THE LAW<\/a>” (Florida State Univ. Law Review, 1996)<\/p>\n

Even if you somehow believe there is absolutely no need for legal reform (or you’re too busy milking the present system to improve it), you have to admit Rodell is on target with insights such as:<\/p>\n