9UNP1620HD_Stewart_Macaulay   - I'm Emily Auerbach, and welcome to today's lecture which is part of Eloquence and Eminence: Emeritus Faculty Lectures. It's a series I started 24 years ago as a way of showcasing retired UW faculty known for their scholarly expertise and their teaching excellence. This series is sponsored by the Division of Continuing Studies, the Institute on Aging, the Anonymous Committee, Wisconsin Public Television, and WMUU 102.9 radio.  Stewart Macaulay is the Malcolm Pitman Sharp Hilldale and Theodore Brazeau professor emeritus of law from the UW-Madison, and what all those names mean is a very honored and distinguished professor. Professor Macaulay received his law degree from Stanford in 1955, and joined the UW-Madison faculty two years later. A law school event at Stanford noted that he pioneered the study of business practices and the work of lawyers related to the questions of contract law. And Yale's Grant Gilmore called him, "the Lord High Executioner of the contract is dead movement."  [laughter] Professor Macaulay has published numerous papers and books, including, "Images of Law in Everyday Life: "The lessons of school, entertainment, and spectator sports," and "Contracts: Law in Action." He has won many honors, including a 2004 Outstanding Scholar award from the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation. Please join me in welcoming Professor Stewart Macaulay for a talk today titled, "The Rule of Law and the Law in Action." [applause] - I invite you to join me in thinking about the American legal system, but given where I come from, I wanna think about the law in action part of the American legal system. If you just want to take a look at the rule of law and a lot of writing, it looks like a high school book about the American legal system. We have a separation of powers. We have federalism. We have a right of jury trial, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well yeah, that's good, and I don't want to say anything negative about that. It's just that there's a lot more going on, and it's that more that's going on that we wanna turn to and look at it.  I'm not trashing the system, let me push hard on that. I was married to a lawyer who did some wonderful work for about 17 years, sadly died of breast cancer, and good people are involved trying to make life better. The problem for a lawyer tends to be, as she found out, by the time you get the problem, your choices are really making something that's terrible really bad. Those are the options. Unfortunately, the dean of the law school does not give you a magic wand. This is one of the sad failures of our whole legal education. It would be nice to paste the pages back on the calendar before you met the bad guy, and we haven't got much of a way of doing that.  Rule of law has gone from a concern of a few scholars and a couple of international organizations that tried to use it to push third-world countries into shaping up their legal system into one of those phrases that you really don't want to search online because you'll just get an overload of hits. It's just everywhere in the last, oh what, six months or so.  Donald Trump does not abide by the rule of law. No, it was Barack Obama who didn't deal with the rule of law. I'm hoping to avoid most of that because that really boils back down to who do you like. And that's a fun conversation too, but that's for another time when we get into this sort of thing. There are certain parts of it though that I will, things that are going on that I will take a look at. Now, first thing we gotta do is take a look at this idea of the rule of law. And just to avoid having to say the situation, this is something I've never studied or spent much time on. Fortunately I've got a lot of good friends at the University of Wisconsin law faculty who've written fine articles about it and it's not bad to know who to steal from. That's one of the important things to learn in scholarship, I think.  Kathryn Hendley says the phrase has become a trendy political slogan around the world, and its contents is what you like. And you