Reflection.

• Author: Williams, Patricia J.
• Position: Fourth Annual Symposium: The Work of Patricia Williams

This symposium has been unquestionably the greatest honor of my life. I am deeply grateful to all who planned it, particularly Katherine Franke and Suzanne Goldberg; to each of the remarkable speakers; and to the ever-supportive institutional community of Columbia University. Anything I say beyond that much risks sounding like a bad speech at the Oscars, without benefit of a recuperatively fetching gown. But I am appreciative beyond words for the work invested in shepherding this event into being. It feels as though a truckload of fairy dust had been dumped on me, and suddenly, suddenly ... little academic wings have sprouted from my shoulders!

I am grateful too because this occasion was an opportunity to pause and reflect upon the trajectory of struggle that this body of writing grows out of--well beyond even what collected on these pages. I apprehend it as a coming-together of so many of the people with whom I have been in conversation my entire career. And nothing I have ever written could have been written without that colloquy--without the reading groups that met in rotating living rooms, the writing support retreats, the fights about the meaning of "critical legal studies," the feminist legal theory workshops, the huddles in committee meetings, the glass ceilings broken, the culture wars waged, the vulnerabilities consoled, the life stories offered, the political assaults wreaked upon friends like Lani Guinier and Anita Hill--to say nothing of the personal toll all of us felt as they endured the brunt of those assaults on our behalf. I am grateful for the sustenance of remarkable mentors like the late Derrick Bell and Barbara Johnson, for their spirits abide; for time spent in deep interdisciplinary thought, time like Robert Pollack's faculty seminars or the three summers I passed at Anna Deavere Smith's Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue. And I am lucky indeed to have had practical assistance from mentors like Sacvan Bercovitch who sent the essay that is the subject of this symposium off for publication at a time when publication of it was as far from my intention as the moon.

Let me turn to the story of how On Being the Object of Property launched the personal trajectory that brings us to this point. When I wrote this essay for which I have become so notorious, I'd been a trial lawyer for five years, and a law professor for another seven after that. I was lonely and miserable in my chosen profession. How lonely? How miserable...