The importance of other disciplines in the study of law was apparent to me from my first days in law school in the mid-1970s. Already by then, economics loomed large in most first-year courses at my law school, as at the other national schools. My teachers for torts, contracts, and property had already incorporated the lessons of Guido Calabresi's Cost of Accidents and Posner's Economic Analysis of Law into the fabric of their classes. History, political science, sociology, and philosophy entered into one course or another my second and third year.

As an English major who had avoided most of the social sciences and all of economics, it was something of a surprise, more of a surprise than it should have been. Law does not exist in a vacuum. We can understand the law only if we understand both how it affects the behavior of the society it governs and how it reflects the values its citizens have. For this reason, one cannot study law as if it were a self-contained world unto itself. The other disciplines give us the tool kit to understand how the law works in our world.

The centrality of other disciplines to the study of law is often misunderstood. To be sure, it might be useful to take a course that focuses explicitly on the relationship between law and another discipline, such as law and economics, feminist jurisprudence, or law and philosophy. After all, these courses have long been staples at Chicago and other schools. Assuming that these disciplines must be connected with a discrete course offering, however, implicitly undervalues them. Interdisciplinary study brings the biggest rewards when it is brought into the traditional mainstays of the curriculum.

The basic contracts course offers a number of examples. The conventional measure of damages for breach of contract is the amount of money that would put the innocent party in the same position as if the other had performed. Economics can both suggest how one should measure this amount and how doing so correctly (or incorrectly) will alter the way people tend to behave. When reading cases in which one of the litigants is a woman, especially from a different era, the insights of feminist jurisprudence are invariably useful. (An important doctrine in contract law stems from a case called Lumley v. Wagner, involving a famous soprano. It is hard to understand that case or its subsequent impact without knowing the insights that feminist scholarship has brought to it.)

Law teachers whose scholarship frequently takes them to other disciplines run two different risks. First, they may inject their courses with insights from their area of expertise to the exclusion of the legal fundamentals and, as important, to the exclusion of insights from other disciplines. In such cases, the teaching tends to be narrow and idiosyncratic. Second, in order to avoid this trap, teachers sometimes slight interdisciplinary material altogether. These courses tend to be too bland and make law too remote, too flat, and too dull.

This view, however, is not universally shared. Indeed, one of the oddest arguments I ever had with a colleague was when I was teaching as a visiting professor at another law school. Our discussion concerned the role that critical legal studies should play in the first-year contracts class. I advanced the idea that a number of important ideas belonged in the course. The person taking the contrary view was himself strongly identified as a critical legal studies scholar, and it was his work on contract law that I was incorporating into my class and thought others should as well.

I do not recall whether my view ultimately prevailed. In any event what matters as much in the end as the exact content of a course is the enthusiasm, dedication that each person brings to the class. The best classes I have ever had, either as a student or while teaching at Chicago (and elsewhere) have been the ones in which everyone was engaged in the conversation.

Professor Douglas G. Baird