John Inazu's Learning to Disagree

Lessons from law school, life, and other people

I mentioned at the end of Friday’s post that I had purchased John Inazu’s new book, Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect. My copy came Saturday and I read the whole thing in one sitting yesterday.

I loved this book for many reasons. Drawing upon his law school classes¹, observations on faculty culture, and personal experiences, it matched my interests directly.

The book is organized around the months of an academic year. He moves from orientation for new law school students to a family beach vacation in North Carolina.

The socratic method of law school was a great way to introduce the complexity of many seemingly-clear issues.² Reading of how the class wrestled with hidden complexities reminded me immediately of Michael Sandel’s Justice, a core book in a senior capstone course I taught for nearly a decade. In fact, Inazu opens his class with a discussion of Dudley and Stevens, which also is in Sandel’s book. The case is about four Englishmen who are shipwrecked and out of food and water. They kill and eat the youngest member. Inazu doesn’t endorse cannibalism, to be sure. But he does use the case to address the importance of empathy.

Empathy is not rocket science. It’s hearing an unfamiliar or off-putting argument, pausing to think about what’s been said, and responding with an appropriately engaged question. It’s giving people the benefit of the doubt because you may not know what battles they are fighting. It’s treating others the way you would like to be treated. Empathy is the simple stuff that’s hard to put into practice. (10)

Not surprisingly, I loved the discussions that arose in his Law and Religion class. Here also he addresses interesting but relatively obscure cases. Should Snake Handling sects be prosecuted for the death of a congregant? Can the Jehovah’s Witnesses avoid saying the pledge of allegiance?³ What makes the Amish able to avoid mandatory public school education? He does address Masterpiece v. Colorado, the cake baking case, but critiques former Justice Kennedy for nice sounding aphorisms in place of careful legal analysis. I found myself wishing that I could sit in on his class for a semester, even if I’m a little too old for law school.

John’s observations on faculty culture were as on-point as all the things I loved in Richard Russo’s Straight Man. There is the interaction with the overzealous and opinionated student. Grading papers while on family vacation. The description of a faculty meeting as equivalent to a wedding planning session and the focus on The Seat (the one place where you can minimize interaction with the other faculty). And there is “the brisk walk”:

I hurry down to the faculty meeting with the brisk walk, one of the many unheralded soft skills required of a professor. Faculty like me perpetually cram too many meetings and appointments into a day already busy with classes. But when we’re trying ot get from one place to another, we can’t move so fast to embarrass ourselves scampering past our students like Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. The brisk walk strikes the right balance. Not too fast to break a sweat, but purposeful enough to signal that I don’t have time for more than a passing hello. (40-41)

Then there are the lessons from Inazu’s experiences: preparing to fight a traffic ticket, finding a historic deed for an easement, being stuck on a flight next to the woman with the dog when he has severe allergies, having conversations and golfing with his conservative fellow church member.

Some of these experience are more poignant. He was working in the pentagon on 9/11. He recounts a visit to the internment camp where his grandparents were confined to a 500 square foot room. He writes caringly about his father’s last days.

The final chapter focuses on reflections of the summer beach vacation. Key to this month is that the family has gone internet free, interacting only with the other people in nearby cottages or the coffee shop. There are lessons here about what it means to interact with real people, and not the stereotypes we create. Interacting with the latter, especially online, allows us to be firm in our certitude.

I also realized that I ‘m not mad at any of these people. After a couple of days of sitting outside on our balcony, I know more about the actual lives of the people in the house next door than I do about any of the partisan strangers I encounter on social media. And perhaps because I have been observing the ordinariness of these people’s lives, I tend to assume the best about them. Or at least, I don’t assume the worst abotu them. (166)

Or, as we learned in Muppets Take Manhattan, “peoples is peoples.”

I highly recommend John’s book to anyone trying to see “peoples” in the midst of a contentious and divided age. It’s a fun read that offers timely messages for all of us.

Note: I’m off this rest of this week for the 75th Anniversary meeting of the Religion News Association in Pittsburgh. I’m sure I’ll have lots to share in next week’s posts.

1. John is the Sally Danforth Distinguished Professor of Law and Religion at Washington University in St. Louis.

2. I was hooked when he made the obligatory Professor Kingsfield reference from The Paper Chase. If you don’t know the context, Kingsfield gives first year law student Timothy Bottoms a dime and tells him “Call you mother and tell her that there’s serious doubt about you ever become in a lawyer.” Kingsfield is not a model for faculty to emulate.

3. And what are we doing when we say the pledge? As a bonus, he explores Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA even though I don’t think he anticipated the new $60 bible.