By Way of Introduction

Michael Negron and James Weingarten^*

We are all pragmatists now. That is, the consequences of law and policy for people’s lives are simply too vital to be subjugated to ideology. And this review begins from a premise that government today suffers from an excess of ideology and a dearth of attention to real-world consequences. The fault does not lie solely with the Bush Administration; the left and right alike have minted polemic as the chief currency of our discourse.

If the late twentieth century proved to be, as Irving Kristol maintained, an age of ideology, we hope the Harvard Law & Policy Review helps augur an era of principled pragmatism. With HLPR, we propose an arena for frank debate. Participants in the conversation that unfolds in these pages need not subscribe to any single dogma or doctrine. Contributors to HLPR will differ in opinion yet share progressive principles founded upon the universal respect for human dignity and rights, a commitment to equal access to justice and opportunity, and the proposition that where an individual starts in life must not determine where she finishes.

We reject programmatic approaches to law and policy as incapable of keeping pace with a twenty-first-century America of instantaneous communication and commerce. An approach to constitutional interpretation dependent upon a textual séance with the Founders threatens to, in the words of Chief Justice Marshall, “cripple the government and render it unequal to the object for which it is declared to be instituted.” The once striking observation that global markets deeply impact our daily lives is now banal, but the resulting pressure to adapt legal doctrines and government policies is acute. The use of power (hard and soft) abroad must be premeditated and alert to possible repercussions. The specter of perpetual war menaces our bedrock principle of separation of powers. At home, an influx of immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East tests the flexibility of the Religion Clauses and requires a reevaluation of the meaning of citizenship itself. Demography necessitates reevaluation of how to keep entitlement programs afloat. And still, even when the new wine must be poured into old bottles, the solutions to twenty-first-century challenges must be our own.

Although the review's ethos sounds in the values of progressivism, these common values will not produce uniformity of thought. We expect HLPR to inspire, to challenge, and sometimes to infuriate our readership. HLPR will revisit progressive assumptions about the relationship of culture and religion to law, the place of the individual in a capitalist society, and the normative value of markets. Stated another way, we invoke Lionel Trilling to express our hope that HLPR helps “recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility.” We welcome the debate to come.

* Michael Negron & James Weingarten are students at Harvard Law School and Co-Founders of the Harvard Law & Policy Review.

Preferred Citation: Michael Negron & James Weingarten, By Way of Introduction, 1 HARV. L. & POL'Y REV. (Online) (Sept. 18, 2006), http://www.hlpronline.com/2006/06/
negron_weingarten_01.html.