Commodity's Propriety

Abstract

I have known Greg Alexander for a very long time. Indeed, except for members of his family, I may have known Greg longer than anyone else at this conference celebrating Greg and his work. Since the beginning of this long friendship, we have had three notable encounters, and I would like to begin this Comment with those. The first encounter was at the University of Chicago Law School in the early 1970s. I was a student there at the time, and Greg was a Bigelow Fellow, one of the Law School’s much-sought-after year-long positions as legal writing instructors. I was already in my second year by then, so there was no chance that I would have had Greg as my Bigelow teacher, but somehow Greg and I and a fellow student and good friend, Martha Fineman, all gravitated together. Martha is now a very distinguished legal academic, holding a Woodruff Chair at Emory University School of Law. But even back then, both she and Greg were determined to go into law teaching. I, on the other hand, was not. I had just jettisoned a history teaching career to go to law school, and I had resolved to steer clear of anything like an academic career. But under Greg’s and Martha’s influence, I weakened. In that sense, Greg’s and Martha’s long-ago example explains why I now have the opportunity to say anything at all about Greg’s voluminous academic work.