Kimberly K. Smith – författare

Winner: Merle Curti Intellectual History Award

In this work of historically informed political theory, Kimberly Smith sets out to understand how nineteenth-century Americans answered the question of how the people should participate in politics. Did rational public debate, the ideal that most democratic theorists now venerate, transcend all other forms of political expression? How and why did passion disappear from the ideology (if not the practice) of American democracy? To answer these questions, she focuses on the political culture of the urban North during the turbulent Jacksonian Age, roughly 1830-50, when the shape and character of the democratic public were still fluid.

Smith’s method is to interpret, in light of such popular discourse as newspapers and novels, several key texts in nineteenth-century American political thought: Frederick Douglass’s Fourth of July speech and Narrative, Angelina Grimke’s debate with Catharine Beecher, Frances Wright’s lectures, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Such texts, Smith finds, highlight many of the then-current ideas about the extremes of political expression. Her readings support the conclusions that the value of rational argument itself was contested, that the emergent Enlightenment rationalism may have helped to sterilize political debate, and that storytelling or testimony posed an important challenge to the norm of political rationality.

Smith explores facets of the political culture in ways that make sense of traditions from Whiggish resistance to Protestant narrative testimony. She helps us to understand such puzzles as the point of mob action and other ritualistic disruptions of the political process, our simultaneous attraction to and suspicion of political debates, and the appeal of stories by and about victims of injustice. Also found in her book are keen analyses of the antebellum press and the importance of oratory and public speaking.

Smith shows that alternatives to reasoned deliberation—like protest, resistance, and storytelling—have a place in politics. Such alternatives underscore the positive role that interest, passion, compassion, and even violence might play in the political life of America. Her book, therefore, is a cautionary analysis of how rationality came to dominate our thinking about politics and why its hegemony should concern us. Ultimately Smith reminds the reader that democracy and reasoned public debate are not synonymous and that the linkage is not necessarily a good thing.

Why did it take so long for American law schools to start teaching about climate change? Although most environmental law professors were aware of climate change by 1990, it took nearly fifteen years for them to incorporate the topic into their curriculum. In her innovative new work, Kimberly K. Smith explores how American environmental law professors have addressed climate change, identifying the barriers they faced, how they overcame them, and how they created ᑤclimate law” as a domain of legal specialization.

Making Climate Lawyers explores the history of why American law schools were resistant to teaching about climate change and how that changed over the course of a forty-year period, resulting in law schools across the country incorporating climate change into their curricula, with many even establishing centers on the environment. Smith challenges dominant explanations of why the United States was slow to develop climate policy: it wasn’t just political opposition or short-sightedness. Creating climate legal professionals required changing the fundamentals of legal education.

Based on dozens of interviews with faculty and students, Making Climate Lawyers fills a gap in the literature on the intellectual history of climate change, most of which focuses on the history of climate science. Smith focuses instead on how the climate problem fits (or doesn’t fit) into the structure of American law. She uses this story as a lens through which to understand both the transformation of legal education since the 1980s and the nature of climate change as a policy problem.