There is nothing inevitable about the three-year program of legal study, any more than there is about the four-year presidency or the seven-game World Series. These are artificial constructs, but with time and experience we can decide whether they work well.
Christine Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. This talk, the 2008 Dewey Lecture in Law and Philosophy, was recorded November 5, 2008, as part of Animal Law Week, sponsored by the McCormick Companions' Fund.
Without question, the most distinctive feature of the modern social democratic state is the rise of administrative agencies, which at the federal level function as a shadowy Fourth Branch of government that fits uneasily into our constitutional scheme of separation of powers, and which at the state level oversee vast swaths of economic activity.
