THE CHALLENGE AHEAD

The Yale Law School has a long and distinguished tradition of interdisciplinary work. In fact, sometimes its involvement with allied disciplines has been so intensive and far-reaching as to call into question its identity as a law school. This journal, founded by a remarkable group of students in the Law School and the Graduate School, continues in that tradition, but has created for itself a unique challenge-the definition of its field of inquiry. The law has been cojoined with a discipline, or group of disciplines, or a perspective-"the Humanities"-that itself has no easily ascertained boundary or content. Academic administrators can, of course, easily define "the Humanities" by reference to their catalogues: "the Humanities" consist of those departments which are neither part of the division of the social sciences nor the physical and biological sciences. The inadequacy of this institutional definition of "the Humanities" becomes clear, however, when we consider the example of "history," or even worse, "political science"-are they part of "the Humanities," or do they belong in the social sciences? Of even greater significance for purposes of defining the scope and mission of this journal, is the failure of this institutional approach to disclose the method or perspective common to the disciplines that might be bunched under the banner of the Humanities. In some academic circles today, it is fashionable to use the concept of "interpretation" to define the humanistic approach and the present editors of this journal are obviously drawn to that strategy. One cannot help but be struck by the frequent references in their prologue to "culture" and "meanings," and by their proclamation, "Law is an interpretive concept, and in a world in which 'there are no facts, only interpretations' we must grow more renective in our examination of the meanings embedded in our culture." In my view, however, any attempt to define "the Humanities" in terms of interpretation risks stretching the concept of interpretation to the point of utter distortion or possibly excluding disciplines such as philosophy that must be at the core of any understanding of "the Humanities" or of any interdisciplinary investigation of "Law and the Humanities." John Rawls-probably the most prominent American philosopher and the one whose work has had the greatest impact on law-has in fact (recently) introduced contextual or historicist elements into his work, but no one