Carol S. Steiker*
I was thrilled to learn of the birth of the new Harvard Law & Policy Review and happy to be invited to comment on its potential as a new feature of the Harvard Law School and ACS landscape. I feel a little bit like one of the fairies in the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale who were invited to the baby princess’s baptism and came offering gifts. So, here are my offerings:
Wearing my law professor hat, I offer the new baby journal a hammer – the “hammer of justice” from the famous folk song, “I’ve got hammer.” As a teacher, I worry sometimes that by teaching our students all the multifarious and subtle moves of legal argument, we somehow unwittingly and unintentionally convey the message that because there is no single “right” legal answer to difficult legal questions, all legal arguments are created equal and that “rightness” in the moral sense drops out of the picture as well. Nothing could be further from my own deeply held beliefs, and nothing could help sustain students more in their attempts to hold onto and deepen their moral commitments than participation in publishing a journal with an openly normative aspiration.