The uses of psychoanalysis in law: the force of Jay Katz's example.

Jay Katz has been one of the most profound and enduring influences on my life as a legal scholar. His influence began at the very moment I entered the Yale Law School as a student in 1962. My understanding of the uses of psychoanalysis in legal analysis begins with the memory of my first encounter with him. I believe that my personal experience mirrors more generally how Jay came to influence all of his students-those lucky enough to sit in his classes as well as those who have only encountered him through his writings. Here then is my memory of my first classroom session with Jay Katz. I had just arrived at Yale Law School in 1962 after two years at Oxford studying law. Yale treated my Oxford degree as the equivalent of the first year course of study; so I began in effect as a transfer student with second-year status. (If you'll excuse the pun, it was transference all the way down from that moment onward.) This transfer status meant that I was immediately eligible for taking some upper-class courses and I enrolled in Family Law-taught by Professors Joe Goldstein and Jay Katz-and this was the first class I attended on my first day at Yale. Before class, we were told to read the New York state statute governing divorce and then the complaint and counter-complaint filed by a couple, identified by pseudonym as Sadie and Perry Lesser.' In their cross-filings, Sadie and Perry alleged that each inflicted indignities on the other, described in considerable detail, drawn from some twenty years of marriage. With this advance reading, I came to class with thirty or so fellow students. Jay and Joe sat side by side at the front of the room, and Joe began with a classically open-ended question. "What's going on here?" he asked-and then he and Jay sat silently waiting for some response. I was puzzled-not just by the question, which seemed extraordinarily odd to me based on my previous Oxford law classes, but even more by the prolonged silence from the teachers that followed that odd question. (The silence, I would bet, lasted no more than fifteen seconds, but in the garrulous world of lawyering to which I'd already been initiated, this fifteen seconds of silence seemed like a very long time indeed.) Then one student raised his hand and spoke, and then another and another. The …