As noted in “Old Penn,” the Gazette devoted an entire issue to the US Bicentennial back in 1976 (the summer before this native Philadelphian first arrived on campus as a student). We’re not making quite as much of this year’s harder-to-remember-and-pronounce US Semiquincentennial, but associate editor Dave Zeitlin C’03 has taken the lead in putting together a package of related articles, including a piece of his own about the—understandably rushed!—first printing of the Declaration of Independence and typesetting projects going on now at Penn’s Common Press, using an 1889 handpress similar to the one used by original printer John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776.
Other entries in our 250th sampler include an explanation of the little-known process through which the school founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1740 and known in 1776 as the College of Philadelphia came to be named the University of Pennsylvania; an investigation into the members of the Class of 1776; a profile of the alumnus taking charge of the City of Philadelphia’s semiquincentennial initiatives and events; and a description of a Penn Libraries exhibit of photographs, publications, posters, flyers, stickers, and memorabilia created by bicentennial-era protest groups calling for an alternative to the mainstream celebrations featuring tall ships and then-President Gerald R. Ford. (Penn President J. Larry Jameson also takes up the theme in this issue’s “From College Hall.”)
Almost as famous—and central to the nation’s self-conception—as the Declaration’s “All men are created equal” is the phrase carved onto the US Supreme Court building, “Equal Justice Under Law,” which comes in for harsh scrutiny in Law on Trial: An Unlikely Insider Reckons with Our Legal System by Presidential Professor of Law Shaun Ossei-Owusu LPS’08, who calls it one of “America’s collection of beautiful fictions” that “mocks the brutal, lived reality of many Americans.”
In “Witness and Judge,” frequent contributor Julia M. Klein traces Ossei-Owusu’s trajectory from growing up in the South Bronx as the child of working class Ghanaian immigrants, his education (including a master’s degree from Penn’s School of Liberal and Professional Studies in Urban Studies and Africana Studies), experience as a law student and foray into practicing corporate Big Law, and ultimately to becoming a scholar who has brought all the elements of his background together to analyze how the structure of legal education and lawyers’ professional obligations and priorities combine to thwart the ideal of equal treatment.
Among many accolades, Julia quotes Columbia law professor David Pozen rating Law on Trial as “a genuinely eye-opening study of how inequality threads its way through legal pedagogy and the legal system,” characterized especially by its “panoramic quality.” She also shares Ossei-Owusu’s self-assessment of his approach—“I like to take big swings”—and notes his “surprisingly cheerful” demeanor for someone who’s “just written a devastating takedown of the American legal system.”
The Golden Gate Bridge is certainly one of the most historic American structures, a marvel of engineering conceived and built against daunting odds in the era of the Great Depression—and photographed innumerable times since its opening in 1937. In his latest book, Thirty-Six Views of the Golden Gate Bridge, photographer Arthur Drooker C’76 set himself the (also daunting) task of seeing the bridge “anew.” In “Fresh Angle,” we offer a generous selection of his images, supplemented by a brief interview with the photographer.
—John Prendergast C’80
Editor
