Ian Macneil

Joel calls my attention to the death of Ian Macneil, professor emeritus at Northwestern University Law School and (surprise) The MacNeil of Barra, Chief of Clan MacNeil also known as Clan Niall and 26th of Barra, also Baron of Barra. Although we certainly weren't friends, I had the great good fortune to spend some time in the company of the Baron of Barra over a couple of weeks many years ago: we were both participants in one of Henry Manne's "economics summer camps," which meant we had time to do the things you do at camp: loll around and hang out in the long summer evenings (we maintained a nodding acquaintance for many years after). He was everything you would hope (but, realistically, might not expect) from the Baron of Barra: he was pleasant and congenial, a bit formal, too tactful to be courtly, but altogether the best of company. He also had one defining quality that you might not expect in a Baron: an almost insatiable curiosity about the world and how it worked. He seemed to be interested in just about everything in the human condition, but in particular the matter of how people got along--or perhaps you might say "rubbed along"--in a fractious and imperfect world.

Ian's nominal field was the law of "contracts," but "contracts" doesn't really catch the flavor of Ian's work. "Contracts" smacks of deals, bargains, handshakes, slapping the ground to ratify an agreement. Ian was far more interested in what he was pleased to call "relational" contracts--human encounters that extend over time, with all the attendant stratagems and devices that we bring to our human interchanges. In a number of articles and books, Ian tossed out a thousand conjectures and insights about how these relationships might be understood. It's no accident that his "other" field was the law of"arbitration"--the settlement of the same sorts of disputes.

For a time it seemed that Ian (with others, notably Stewart Macaulay at the University of Wisconsin) was going to revolutionize law teaching, perhaps law itself. Yet it doesn't seem to have happened. It may be that the law world is wiser for what Ian said and did, but I suspect there is a whole gaggle of younger academics who wouldn't even recognize his name.

It is an interesting but I suspect unanswerable question why such a fertile mind could vanish so completely. I suspect that part of it was that Ian didn't slot very well into the continuing intellectual narrative. Granted, he certainly engaged with "contract law" as commonly understood in the academy. But his imagination was so fertile and his ideas came so thick and fast that it was hard to pin him down as part of any particular doctrine or genre. I see he had an undergraduate degree in "sociology;" it probably didn't help to have cut his teeth in a discipline which itself seemed to be disintegrating around him.

A corollary is that while there is an abundance of Macneil material--categories, lists, charts, taxonomies--you really can't really turn him into to much of a soundbite (unless the cry of "relational contracts" will bring the troops to the parade ground). In this respect, I wonder if perhaps he is a bit like the late Myres McDougal, another one who flashed across the night sky and seems to have left not a trace behind (one difference: a few decades ago there were scores of McDougal acolytes; I don't think there was ever really a "school of Macneil," but in the end, it may have come to the same thing).

Another problem may be that in the end Macneil was too much of a gentleman to make it as a scholar. Clearly he loved to absorb ideas, and he refashioned them with non-neurotic ease. But he lacked the intensity, the savage ambition, the taste for internecine warfare that you probably need to make yourself king of this particular mountain.

In the end, it didn't do a bit of good to his American academic reputation that he retired to Scotland, to his lairdship and to (it says in the obits) the annual rent payment of one bottle of fine malt whisky, said to be his right as proprietor of a 1,000-year-castle. And although I write as if he were "forgotten," there's a lengthy, thoughtful and informed Wiki; clearly somebody remembers the 26th of Barra.

Here's a good obit.

Editor's query: caps or lc? MacNeil or Macneil? The sources are inconsistent, but the Northwestern Emeritus page goes with lc so I will too. One l or two? Again I go with the emeritus page which lists only one.

Afterthought: Macaulay, McDougal, Macneil--a gaggle of Scots?

Update: Joel also points us to a superb meditation on what it means to be the laird of the manor.