Interdisciplinarity as Colonization

Abstract

This Article arose out of a very enjoyable conference on interdisciplinary legal studies held at Washington and Lee University School of Law, and I cannot resist beginning my discussion by describing the conference brochure. This brochure, obviously prepared with some care, offers an interesting story about interdisciplinarity. It features a field of question marks of , various sizes with the words "Writing Across the Margins" superimposed across them in large letters. I think it is a Courier typeface, the kind you would see on a typewriter, and it invokes the image of margins set by a typewriter. Below the title, in Times New Roman typeface, appears a question whose distinctive setting indicates its central importance: "What can go wrong," we are asked, "when a legal scholar tries to escape confmement and write about constitutional law from the perspective of the humanities?"