 |
Current Work/Current Thoughts
Project Writings
Contact Information
Bio
Peter Gabel, 56, has been a law professor at New College of California's
nationally praised public-interest law school for 30 years, currently sits
on the Board of Trustees, and served as President for 20 years. He is also
a Professor of Psychology and former Dean of the College's Graduate School
of Psychology. Together with Rabbi Michael Lerner he developed "The
Politics of Meaning", an approach to social transformation emphasizing the
central ontological nature of the desire for mutual recognition, and the
centrality to politics of overcoming the legacy of alienation separating
self and other. A founder of The Critical Legal Studies movement in legal
education, Peter has also taught at Boalt Hall, the University of Minnesota
Law School, and the City University of New York's public-interest Law
School. Most recently he has organized a nationwide group of lawyers and
law professors to form the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and
Politics.
Peter graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. from Harvard College in 1968,
and Magna Cum Laude with a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1972. He went on
to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology at The Wright Institute in 1981 and holds a
Marriage, Family and Child Counseling License. He has been a practicing
Marriage and Family Therapist during the last two decades and was a founder
of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health in Oakland.
Mr. Gabel is Associate Editor of Tikkun magazine, a bi-monthly Jewish
critique of politics, culture, and society and has written a number of
articles for Tikkun on subjects ranging from the original intent of the
framers of the Constitution ("Founding Father Knows Best") to the
creationism/evolution controversy ("Creationism and the Spirit of Nature").
In addition he has published more than a dozen articles in law journals
such as the Harvard Law Review and Texas Law Review, focusing on the role
of law in shaping popular consciousness and on how law can best be used to
bring about progressive social change. His recent book, The Bank Teller and
other Essays on the Politics of Meaning, explores the desire within each of
us to overcome our isolation and to see and be seen by the other in a
relation of authentic connectedness. He asserts that this desire for mutual
recognition is the very foundation of our social being and is as
fundamental in the spiritual realm as the need for food and shelter is in
the material realm. Using this philosophic framework, Gabel sheds new light
on a wide range of subjects, including health care, affirmative action, and
abolishing the SAT. He is also the author of numerous articles in
publications such as The Psychoanalytic Review on the psychodynamics
underlying cultural phenomena.
Current Work/Current
Thoughts
This fall I am teaching a required first-year course at New College Law
School called "The Politics of Law" that tries to illuminate the
individualist and materialist assumptions embedded in the other first-year
courses, which at New College are Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law and Legal
Research and Writing. In addition, a central aim of my class is to present
a vision of social justice that follows from Martin Luther King Jr.'s
definition of justice as "Love correcting that which revolts against love."
The point is to reveal the inherently spiritual nature of social existence,
to show the ways that our inherent interconnectedness and longing for
recognition and affirmation by the other is obscured and denied by the
existing adversary system and legal culture as a whole, and to help
students envision how the cases they study can be seen in a completely new
light that restores human community rather than reinforcing the separation
of self and other that has been the tragic aspect of the legacy of
"individual rights" that underlies all of American law.
This is not to say that the achievements of the late 18th century in
affirming the sovereignty of the individual and the protection of the
individual from the group were not significant. It is simply to say that
the task of our generation is a new task: to help humanity overcome the
social alienation and Fear of the Other that now blocks our inherent
longing for and capacity for the creation of a loving and caring world, a
world in which self and other are bonded through mutual presence,
recognition, and connection.
In addition to my teaching, I am organizing a regional group here in San
Francisco of the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law, and Politics
that will bring together law teachers, lawyers, and law students in the Bay
Area who share our group's aspiration to connect the inner and the outer in
a fundamental transformation of legal culture. Central to this project is
our conviction that it is law that defines "the bottom line" of what the
culture perceives as legitimate assumptions about the nature of self and
other. In seeking to move toward a model of law that heals the distortions
in human interrelatedness that is a legacy of our inherited fear of the
other and "misrecogniton" of the other, we are seeking to develop new
spiritual remedies for the resolution of conflict, remedies that assume our
connection rather than our separation and disconnection. We are also
developing new approaches to doctrine that reinterpret the ideals of
liberty and equality in a manner that challenges the meanings of these
words that are reinforced by the mutual antagonism of the competitive
marketplace. Instead our idea is to show that liberty and equality can only
actually be realized through cooperation and love, through each self
recognizing the other as a Thou and feeling recognized as such in return.
In our San Francisco regional group, Professor Rhonda Andrews from the
University of San Francisco Law School is leading a discussion on "How the
Black Philosophy of Existence and the Black Experience Can Provide a Ground
for the Spiritual Reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment." Subsequent
conversations will include everything from a redesigning of the law school
curriculum to foreground the moral work of a lawyer while minimizing the
emphasis on analytical rule manipulation that dominates contemporary legal
education, the development of understanding-based mediation and restorative
justice as radically new approaches to human conflict emphasizing apology,
forgiveness, and the creation of community out of conflict, and the
reinterpretation of the duty of corporate officers to include ethical
imperatives arising from the spiritual/social nature of our common
existence and challenging the presumption that the duty of corporate
officers is to maximize the short-term profits of detached and self-
interested shareholders.
My current work
(download Tikkun article as PDF file)
also is strongly
focused on "communalizing" my own neighborhood, Noe Valley in San
Francisco. I spent the summer leading a successful effort to save our local
independent bookstore, part of which involved getting 1000 neighbors to
commit to purchasing one $25 book per month. In addition, I was able to
raise $200,000 through a community-based appeal that brought out the best
progressive sentiments in our neighborhood and allowed us to reveal to each
other that we were all here/there. These efforts have now turned into a new
campaign to reverse the immoral conduct of our local health food store
(owned by Nutraceutical, a Utah-based corporation) in closing its doors
overnight, allegedly for remodeling, and terminating workers for union
activity--an act amounting to violence toward both the workers and the
community. I am currently helping to continue to mobilize the neighborhood
to insist upon ethical relationships in all aspects of our communal life.
Contact Information
Peter
Gabel
New College of California
777 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Phone: 415-282-7197
Fax: 415-626-5171
E-mail: pgabel@newcollege.edu
|
|
