By Annemarie Guare, Julian Montijo, and Meg Foster
On April 8, 2022, Northeastern University School of Law (NUSL) celebrated the legacy of Karl Klare, George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law, with a day-long conference organized and attended by the peers, mentors, students, and friends who have shaped and been shaped by Karl. As three of those students, the Northeastern University Law Review asked that we write an article in conjunction with the Labor of Love conference. We readily agreed, honored to provide a testimonial, if not also allured by the prospect of probing someone who has walked the halls of this curious institution for forty odd years.
What follows is the product of an evening with Karl, where we set out to dictate a fun and personal Q&A session, and Karl pushed back with a challenge that we instead reflect on our individual and collective experiences as students of the law. The result, we hope, is a compromise: a revelation of the forces that brought Karl to NUSL and compelled him to stay, and a firsthand record of the myriad ways in which Karl has ultimately created, for us, the very thing he sought in pursuing a legal education himself—a political space where ideas matter and the tools for justice are forged.
Das Kapita(r)l: The Makings of a Radical Lawyer
Despite Karl’s obvious namesake and the fact that his father was a lifelong union organizer whose only practiced religion was that of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), labor is not what led Karl to law school. In the same year that Karl finished his graduate studies at Yale, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the Vietnam War was still defiantly raging on, and students across the country—most notably, at his alma mater, Columbia University—were protesting segregation and imperialism. Inspired in particular by the legal team that helped to secure the release of Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale from prison, Karl, who had already published a book on Marxism and was teaching political science, decided that the law might be a more practical avenue for his own contribution to social change.
He was not so convinced upon arriving at Harvard Law School, where the professors were imperious, the classroom infantilizing, and the curriculum sanitized and prosaic. Karl’s description of his first year of law school bears some resemblance to our own. Though (most) professors are no longer abusive, and curriculums have benefitted some from a growing student demand for courses that reflect the realities of a legal system that is simultaneously harmful and reformative, there seems to be an institutional myopia that, even 50 years later, pervades legal education and consequently, frustrates the self-awareness and imagination required of transformative lawyering.
But Karl found refuge from a creeping nihilism in the company of several young professors turned mentors turned, in some cases, lifelong friends—all of whom shared a common belief that the law was not a technical field, but an intellectual one, deeply imbued with the politics of its creators and subjects. Karl is humble about his influences, but they warrant recognition: Duncan Kennedy, Roberto Unger, and Morton Horwitz are luminaries in the legal academy and, with Karl, established the Critical Legal Studies movement of the late-twentieth century;1 Gary Bellow was a pioneering poverty lawyer “considered to be one of the founders of modern clinical legal education”; and Bernard Dunau was a respected and compassionate labor lawyer who instilled in his students an understanding of Holmes’ observation that law is guided not by logic, but by experience.2
While ancestral roots may have played some cosmic role, Karl’s first post-graduate positions—first as an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and then for one of the oldest labor law firms in the Northeast, Segal Roitman, LLP—were undoubtedly a product of his reception to his mentors’ formulation of the law as political. It’s hard to think of a more politically charged space than the labor movement, where workers’ demands for basic rights threaten the foundation of a carefully manipulated accumulation of private wealth, and where idealistic visions of collective empowerment have had to grapple with harsh realities of racism, sexism, ableism, and homophobia. In labor law, Karl found a field that was both practically useful to clients and intellectually challenging to him. He also found an entry back into academia, the primary site of his resistance to the traditional rigidity of legal pedagogy, through critical thought and radical optimism.
In the summer of 1976, Duncan Kennedy recommended Karl to fill in as an adjunct labor law professor during the tenured professor’s sabbatical. Juggling his practice at Segal Roitman with the demands of teaching, he fell in love with the latter, and more specifically, fell in love with NUSL and its students. A year later, he was being considered for a post at Harvard Law School when a full-time position at NUSL opened up. This was a serendipitous moment in his career where the unique aspects of the NUSL community became clear. Karl tells us that he actually curated two resumes, one that he jokingly calls his “kosher” resume, and his real resume: one that includes the full spectrum of his leftist work, including the book he wrote about Marxism and the time he spent as an editor of Socialist Review (formerly Socialist Revolution). NUSL, he says, got his real resume.
As the adage goes, the rest is history. For the past four decades, Karl has made NUSL his home, following in the footsteps of his own mentors at Harvard to teach generations of law students that lawyers really can (and should) make the world a better place. A central facet in all of Karl’s work, from developing theories of transformative constitutionalism in post-apartheid South Africa to encouraging student involvement in NUSL governance, is his commitment to building more participatory systems where those who have been historically excluded are not only brought to the table but in fact sit at its head. This was a recurring theme from panelists across the globe on April 8, and Karl also consistently brings these foundational philosophies into his classrooms. In doing so, he eschews the traditional hierarchy of law school: as much as he challenges us to interrogate our preconceived notions about the law, we challenge him to do the same.
During our Q&A, he tells us that faculty tend to stay at NUSL because of the unique connections made with social justice-minded students, and that he is no exception. As many of his former students remembered fondly, Karl carefully nurtures communities of intellectual equals seeking to learn from one another. Somehow, he balances this with an acute awareness of his responsibility in helping to shape future generations of lawyers. It is a delicate equilibrium that could only be struck by someone like Karl: someone with an ever-present humility, an earnest passion for legal education, and an unwavering respect for his students. He has become for many at NUSL, including those in this article’s byline, what Kennedy, Unger, and Horwitz were for him: a mentor who teaches us that legal education and practice are politically important spaces, and by embracing the potential that comes with that understanding, we can develop and nurture liberatory dreams.
An Important Aside
No interview with Karl would be complete without discussion of his friendship with Lucy Williams. The two can be seen together at all times of the Northeastern day, be it at the gym pumping iron or shuffling between one another’s offices to share in the latest gossip. Together, they embody what Northeastern Law is for many of us—a place where we can rigorously learn how to become smart and creative advocates for social justice while simultaneously maintaining positive personal relationships, a distrust of corporate coffee chains, and our humor. Lucy assured her students that, during the pandemic, although she and Karl were physically separated, they maintained daily phone calls that lasted hours. On a more personal note, Lucy and her family were a great support to Karl after the passing of his wife, Hallie, in 2005. When Karl speaks of Hallie, it is obvious that she was/is nothing less than his soulmate; he shows us pictures of her that sit in all corners of his house, documenting their many travels and memories together.
Lucy was one of the organizers of the April 8 event, which included a panel that focused in part on their professional career together with the International Social and Economic Rights Project (ISERP). This project has taken them to all corners of the globe to “encourage and develop critical and transformative thinking about [Social and Economic Rights (SER)] and SER-based legal strategies.” Indeed, Karl’s friendships span globally: one need only look at those in attendance at Karl’s celebration to understand the far-reaching nature of the meaningful personal and professional relationships he has created.
The Authors’ Personal Musings
Annie:
The first one-on-one interaction I had with Karl came after one of the first days of Labor Law last fall. My father, who also went to NUSL, had Karl for Contracts during his first year. I had no expectation that Karl would remember who he was—after all, it was a long time ago and undoubtedly a large class. But one day after class, I mentioned it to him anyway. The next class, I had largely forgotten about it, but he told me that he had something to show me. He had gone back through his files, found the class roster for that first-year class, circa 1980, and printed out my father’s picture to show me. That seemingly small interaction confirmed everything I had heard about Karl: his brilliance as a lawyer and academic is second only to his thoughtfulness and sincere desire to build connections with his students beyond the syllabus. I will never forget this moment, nor will I soon forget the appreciative laughs from the panelists and audience when I told this story during a Q&A session on April 8. They knew what I now know as well: this is vintage Karl Klare.
I would be remiss if I didn’t also say a few (inadequate) words about the impact American Legal Thought had on me. This is a legal theory class that challenges students to unpack the social, historical, and psychological experiences that shape legal reasoning. We are encouraged to push past the risk-averse, formalistic approach to legal education and practice that dominated Karl’s own early experiences and instead embrace the law’s indeterminacy. After two years of memorizing out-of-context doctrine and questioning my future as a leftist lawyer, this was truly a cathartic grounding experience that helped pull me out of my burgeoning cynicism. American Legal Thought was a refuge, a time for me to develop a deeper understanding of the law’s rich potential to be a tool for radical social change, if only we can understand how to shape and deploy it. I will forever be grateful to Karl for opening these doors for me, and I have no doubt I will carry the insights I discovered behind them throughout my entire career.
Julian:
I had heard the lore of Karl Klare long before taking any of his classes. I was told he was a cunning professor, a long-term ally to student-led initiatives, and, most importantly, kind and approachable. I was fortunate to meet him early on in my first year as my advisor, though I was too timid then to engage in gossip with him despite his personable demeanor. It wasn’t until he sat down for the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) “unofficial” NUSL history talk, however, that I came to witness the inspiration and enthusiasm that he invokes. And, while I can’t recount the full details of that pre-pandemic talk (both out of discretion and lack of memory), I do recall his optimism. He looked on a packed room full of mostly first-year students, already jaded by the barrage of doctrine, and told us that we could be the drivers of our legal education; not least of all because of NUSL’s unique history and Law School Charter—a charter that gives students voting power in many major administrative and hiring decisions at Northeastern—but also because a legal education holds potential, however often it may feel otherwise, to support students in making the changes and upheavals that we want to see.
At the conclusion of his talk, Karl offered himself as support for those of us who wanted to make critical our legal studies. A couple weeks later, I was in his office where he’d agreed to help me in crafting a syllabus for a critical legal reading group. (To know if Karl is in his office, check for a tiny sliver of light shining through the books with which he has barricaded his hall-facing windows.) He made me an espresso and, as I drank, began to pull down text after text, showing me his favorite works from critical contracts and feminist legal theory, to old, signed copies of seminal law review articles in critical race theory. In this way, Karl introduced me to a whole world of legal scholarship that I had previously not known existed.
When my 1L year ended, I drafted a reflection in which I described my Pygmalion process toward “thinking like a lawyer.” I shared this with Karl. He was more than generous in his feedback, but challenged me:
[I]sn’t the deeper critique that “thinking like a lawyer” has no intrinsic, culturally un-situated content? Yes, lawyers talk in certain funny ways, they focus on certain problems that other people— e.g., political philosophers, activists, etc.—do not focus on (rightly or wrongly), and they customarily make certain types of arguments but not other types of arguments. Agreed. Legal culture is a real thing—we can identify it, analyze it, criticize it. But legal discourses are always culturally situated. Anyone who spends any time working in another legal culture (in my case, my work in South Africa with leftist lawyers) immediately grasps the historic uniqueness and particularity of one’s legal culture of origin. Put simply, legal argument is a discursive medium; it can constrain us or we can bust it wide open depending on how we work within the medium. To put it perhaps too crudely, using the inevitable metaphor of tools, “thinking like a lawyer” is not a screwdriver; it is more like an ultra-high powered laptop. So, for us, it is not a choice about whether or not we can accomplish good things by “talking lawyer.” The question is how we can and should work within the medium to transform it in radical directions.
This more than anything has stuck with me about Karl. Not just the substance of his teachings (which I hope to do good on as I enter practice this fall), but his thoughtfulness, his encouraging nature, and his overall willingness to challenge his students to be more critical thinkers and stronger advocates for social change.
Meg:
Some things I noticed when I took Employment Law, my first class with Karl: there was no required (and exorbitantly priced) textbook, rather, Karl provided Word copies of each chapter of a book that he compiled himself (this, I came to find out, was true for all of his classes); said textbook did not resemble my 1L casebooks—Karl often incorporated social and political context, as well as information about plaintiffs (turns out they have first names!), especially when its relevance was obscured by a judge’s formalistic sleight of hand, but sometimes just to remind us of the humans behind the cold legal jargon; Karl did not shy away from including materials that surely (no offense) were not taught when he was in law school, bravely updating his memos with contemporary issues that he knew might leave him vulnerable to blunders or disagreement, but also knew to be important to us, and to his own continual learning; Karl almost always ended discussions of complex cases by asking us (us! Lowly students of the law!) whether they were correctly decided; Karl’s ever-so-noticeable disappointment in his leftie students’ utter inability to play devil’s advocate (we suffered enough in constitutional law, sorry); and Karl’s humorous but earnest way of checking in—“are we having fun?” (of course not! This is America, and we are in Employment Law!). As Karl always says, I have about a thousand more words . . . but I’ll just conclude by saying that his most lasting impact on my legal education came not from the substance of his lectures, but from the manner of his lectures: Karl taught by example, which meant that I learned from him to be skeptical of syllogisms, to see the promise in indeterminacy, and to believe, genuinely, that the open expression of righteous indignation does not detract from the intellectual rigor of an argument. And for all of that, I am immensely grateful.
Concluding Thoughts
The amount of love and respect that countless people from around the globe hold for Karl Klare could likely fill several books. At the very least, it spans much wider than anything the words in this article could truly capture. But in closing, it seems appropriate to note the beautiful remarks of Professor Veena Dubal, one of April 8th’s panelists. She noted, with genuine emotion in her voice, that the energy and affection emanating from the room that day was palpable, which spoke to the transcendent power of the love and solidarity that Karl tends to bring out in people. We hope that at this point, it goes without saying that we ardently echo those sentiments.
In retrospect, though we may not have been able to put it into such eloquent words at the time, we now realize that this is the same energy that emanated from Karl when he graciously invited us to his house to conduct our Q&A. And as that night winds to a close, he once again displays his vintage (and almost always factually inaccurate) modesty: “I’m not sure how much of a difference I’ve actually made,” he says to us, with a slightly ironic smile, “but it sure was fun.”
Annemarie Guare, Julian Montijo, and Meg Foster are recent graduates, thanks in large part to Karl Klare, of Northeastern University School of Law. They were introduce to each other, and Karl, through NUSL’s chapter of the National Lawyer’s Guild. All three will be pursuing careers in the public interest: Annie in the Housing Unit of Community Legal Aid (Worcester, MA), Julian in the Family Defense unit at Brooklyn Defender Services, and Meg as a Justice Fellow at the Center for Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.
1 See, e.g., Mark Tushnet, Critical Legal Studies: A Political History, 100 Yale L. J. 1515 (1991).
2 Norton J. Come, Bernard Dunau: A Friend’s Tribute, 88 Harv. L. Rev. 1349, 1350 (1975).