Holding On

Extract

This issue of the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies differs from most in that its focus is not on a published book but on part of a book manuscript—several chapters, in advanced draft, of my forthcoming book From Personal Life to Private Law. As I write this response, the book is finally with its publisher.¹ The material on the basis of which Yiffat Bitton, Greg Keating, and Arthur Ripstein wrote their comments remains substantially unchanged in the final cut. I resisted the temptation to create a never-ending feedback loop by attending to their criticisms of the book in the book itself. Yet the temptation was certainly there. I found what they said about my work uniformly perceptive, scrupulous, and testing. They made me see how many further books, and how many better books, could yet be written on the same topics.

They have also given me a nice opportunity, right now, to illustrate two major themes of the book. The first is apology. I’m really sorry for putting Yiffat, Greg, and Arthur to the trouble of responding so carefully and efficiently to my draft chapters, only to hold up publication of the resulting symposium while I (fussily) finished writing the rest of the book. The second theme is what, in the book, I call “holding on.” We all find it hard to let go of what we have made our own. We attach more value to whatever we are close to, and less to what we might equally have been close to but never were. No doubt I am, in the same way, inordinately attached to my own ideas. As I try to explain in the book, we should not ultimately want it to be otherwise.