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Interview with Terry Hubbard

Recent Teaching History
Law and Sexuality: Sex at the Bar; Winter 2000

Biography

In 1967, then student (now Law Librarian), Terry Hubbard was living in Berkeley, demonstrating against the Viet Nam War In Oakland and studying French history at San Francisco: “reading those dreary French Marxist labor pamphlets. “ The following year, 1968, the year those of us of a certain age were sure that the revolution was underway, Terry could be found at the UCLA Graduate Student Swimming Pool and Cabana working on a degree in Librarianship, pursuing a side interest in intellectual history, and translating pamphlets of The French Revolution. Terry had indeed wandered far from the place of his forebears, rural Vermont.
Terry grew up on a farm 50 miles from nowhere in Vermont. One oddity of rural Vermont is that any number of literate folk followed Robert Frost into the countryside, bought a farm and used the barn to sell antiques or, of more interest to young Terry, used books. He read Goethe by the time he graduated from high school. The idea that if you were a librarian you got to choose the books and instead of paying for them you would get paid for doing it hadn’t occurred yet, but, Terry being no dummy, one could have seen that it would only be a matter of time before he caught on. Terry initiated his post-secondary academic studies at the University of Vermont. He interrupted that to work on construction until he had earned enough money to go to Europe, whereupon he worked on farms in Southern Scotland and in Southern France and then expanded his repertoire of means of gainful employment by singing on street corners in Paris. Resources and stratagems both exhausted, Terry returned to Vermont where he was promptly drafted, where the Army taught him to type and then the Army returned him to Europe. In the Army he worked for the Judge Advocate General.

So when he returned from Europe this time, he wide experience of people and places, he had knowledge of the law, and he knew books. It took awhile and several colleges he went to or was librarian in, but now he’s ours.

His current interest is the impact of changing social proscriptions, i.e. political correctness, on the law as a knowledge system and the courts. Prior to this interest, Terry and his students studied environmental law.

Terry likes Southern authors for the bizarre characters, “They are populated by as many personalities and characters as Grimm could have dreamed up.“ There may be no connection but he also really likes teaching at Evergreen. “I really get into working with students. I thing that the back and forth of teaching—you know the old truism that you learn as much from students as you do from your professors or what you’ve taught yourself. Each one of them brings something; and it’s always beneficial for me in particular, but also for the class in general, to bring that out that they already know. They’re in a course because they have an interest of some sort and they are going to apply it or they investigate how to apply what they are going to get out of the class and that brings with it their conditions of learning, in a way. They are looking for something in there that will help them identify or to expose the fact that it’s not there. And it is particularly true with respect to law because many students are in there because they are curious about law school. So it’s a natural for getting people into the library to do research. And law is often structured in such a way that it is a marvelous, well-documented information system. And it is also a reasoning device. Every time you look at a legal argument you are looking at an example of argumentation. And discovering that half of law is rhetoric. It’s the old form of rhetoric: you pick the argument you want to make, select your facts and go about persuading somebody. And this is almost a revelation, I think, to students. They learn that they can do it too. They also learn that they have to look beyond the argument for the facts that weren’t included in the argument.”

Interviewer: Pete Sinclair

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Last Updated: March 15, 2007