Afterword: The Question of Linkage

Abstract

Commenting on the papers in this symposium is paradoxically a difficult task. The authors are remarkably distinguished and one can only learn from what they write. Indeed, I have learned much from them (especially from Dean David Leebron’s splendid clarification of several aspects of linkage, a paper that shows that he should have been an Oxford philosopher if only he had not been such a successful legal scholar). Yet it is easy for an invited commentator to be overwhelmed by despair because the authors write for the most part as if in a research vacuum. There is little attempt at relating what they write to the enormous literature on the problem of linkage.