Gadfly

HE sees himself not as a political scientist, not as a psychoanalyst, but as a law teacher who happens to have a lot of other interests. "I work with whatever knowledge I have accumulated in other fields," says JOSEPH Goldstein '44, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale, "but I do not press other disciplines on the law."

Among manifestations of those "other interests" are the Ph.D. in political science from the London School of Economics and a diploma from the Western New England Institute of Psychoanalysis. "But I am not a psychoanalyst just because I am trained in psychoanalysis," he insists, "any more than I am a businessman simply because I went to Tuck School."

One thing evolved quite naturally from another, Goldstein explains disarmingly. Studying in London, "I realized that I needed to know the law because of the relationship of the law to political science. Then I realized that the law is based on the way society functions, and that took me into sociology. But, of course, everything rests on an understanding of the nature of the human mind, so I studied psychoanalysis."

Goldstein did practice psychoanalysis for a time, compartmentalizing his pleasantly cluttered office at the law school — using one end for the couch, the other for his work area — installing sound proofing and double doors for privacy. But his training was in classical psychoanalysis, which requires seeing patients five days a week, and time no longer permits.

"I just get wondering about a lot of things," Goldstein comments in monumental understatement. "Then I ask myself 'Would it make any difference if I knew the answer to a certain question?' If my response is 'no,' I go on to other questions."

Goldstein applies the answers to the questions he has asked himself — and poses new ones — both in courses he teaches at Yale and in his extra-curricular involvement with such organizations as New Haven Legal Assistance and the American Bar Association's Committee on the Mentally Disabled. This fall, "still feeling like a beginner," he is teaching Constitutional Law for only the second time, as well as a seminar in Family Law, taught jointly with Albert Solnit, Sterling Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at the medical school and head of the University Child Study Center. In the spring, he will teach Criminal Law and Administration, plus a seminar on Limits of Law, conducted with Burke Marshall, former U.S. Assistant Attorney General in charge of the civil-rights division, in which they study the law's response to the massacre at My Lai and like disasters.

The seminars are a hatching ground for a lot of new work, involving groups of "incredibly good students." Goldstein's 1976 book, The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-Up: Beyond theReach of the Law?, done in collaboration with Marshall and Jack Schwartz, a Vietnam veteran and former student, grew out of the Limits of Law seminar.

Goldstein has written widely in the field of criminal law, frequently in collaboration with Yale colleagues in psychiatry or law, raising controversial issues, controverting long-established assumptions. He questions, for instance, the very purpose of the "insanity defense." "What need for an exception to criminal liability is being met and what objectives of the criminal law are being reinforced by the defense?" he asked in one of a series of articles on the subject. The "why," he contends, must be settled before any standard for the insanity defense can be defined.

Probably Goldstein's most fruitful professional collaboration has been with Solnit and Anna Freud, daughter of Sigmund and founder of the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic, on the outskirts of London. In their first writing venture, Beyond the BestInterests of the Child, the three proposed guidelines setting "what we call the least detrimental alternative standard" for the placement of children whose custody has become the subject of legal action. They put foremost the child's need for continuity of relationships, the child's — as opposed to the adult's — sense of time, and recognition of the court's incapacity to supervise interpersonal relationships. Their second book, Before the BestInterests of the Child, due out this month, goes back a step, to the time before the child is caught up in the legal process, to discuss when and under what circumstances the state should intervene in the relationship between parents — either psychological or biological — and children. "The courts and government agencies often intrude much too early and without sound reason," Goldstein contends, "when they have nothing better to offer," with the poor and minorities frequent victims of bureaucratic meddling. Ironically, in dismaying contrast, he adds, the state may interfere too little or too late in urgent situations involving physical abuse.

Goldstein's collaboration with Freud came about through a fortuitous mistake, midway through his psychoanalytic training. A psychoanalyst friend mislaid the tickets he had for a lecture Freud was giving in New York, replaced them, then found the originals, which he gave to the Goldsteins. "Typical psychoanalyst behavior," he says, grinning. "I was so excited by the way she worked with ideas, I said, 'Why don't we invite her up to teach a seminar at the law school?' " That introduction has led to almost 15 years of a working relationship between the Hampstead clinic and the law school and a collaborative effort that Goldstein says is characterized by mutual respect so great that it permits the co-authors to be very tough with one another, remaining friends the while.

The legal rights of children, like those of other powerless segments of society, are drawing increasing attention, Goldstein says. As to progress toward the ultimate goal of equal justice under the law, "We are always trying," he says, "but we are also always identifying new injustices." Although this may be a nation "committed to using the law for just purposes," that commitment is far from universal, he points out. "All that was done to the victims of the Holocaust was done in conformity with the law. It is not a matter of law, but of fairness, justice, decency."

Special acknowledgement in Goldstein's books invariably goes to colleague, companion, critic, and classmate Sonja Goldstein, a German refugee whom he met and married while they were students in London. They went through Yale Law School together, and she now is a partner in a New Haven firm. With their four children, Daniel '81 the youngest, the Goldsteins summer in Maine, where they own, with another family, substantial acreage planted in blueberries. An early riser, Joe Goldstein has done a good day's writing before noon, leaving the rest of the day free for accumulating new knowledge about newer interests — working with his hands on the place, learning the outdoor skills to which the younger generation has introduced him.

One wonders where Goldstein's ongoing, if circuitous, inquiry into the nature of things, of people, of ideas and the relationships between them will take him next. "It will not be medicine." He's unequivocal on that score. "Otherwise I'm not sure. Maybe if I could find a carpentry school ... I'd really like to be a good carpenter."