Robert Benson, Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, has drawn upon a long, wide-ranging career as teacher, scholar and public interest lawyer to write The Interpretation Game: How Judges and Lawyers Make the Law.
After obtaining an A.B. from Columbia College and doing a postgraduate year at the University of Madrid, Benson took his law degree at the University of California, Berkeley and then spent a year in Brazil on a fellowship to study legal aid to slum dwellers. He worked in community development for the state of Connecticut, practiced law in Washington, D.C., then joined the faculty at Loyola where he has taught for more than 30 years and continues to teach today. Interested equally in theory and practice, law and culture, the local and the global, Benson has taught such courses as Jurisprudence, Legal Method, Legislation, Development of Legal Thought, Public Interest Law, Ethics, International Human Rights, International Environmental Law, Indigenous Peoples Law, Corporate Legal and Ethical Accountability, State and Local Government Law, and Administrative Law. He was the founder of Loyola’s summer law program in Costa Rica.
His scholarship has been similarly broad. “The End of Legalese: The Game Is Over,” 13 N.Y.U. Review of Law & Social Change 519 (1985) was influential in stimulating the Plain English movement for law and continues to be cited currently. He was one of the first to apply semiotics theory to law, writing “The Semiotic Web of the Law,” in 1 Law and Semiotics (Kevelson, ed. 1987); “How Judges Fool Themselves: The Semiotics of the Easy Case,” in 2 Law and Semiotics (Kevelson, ed. 1988); “Semiotics, Modernism and the Law,” 73-1/2 Semiotica 157 (Journal of the International Semiotics Association, Berlin); “The Semiotics of International Law,” 2 International Journal of Semiotics of Law 258 (1989), presented at the University of Bologna and also published in the Proceedings of the International Congress of Sociology of Law for the 9th Centenary of the University of Bologna, 1993. He has analyzed the impact of cultural history on the law, particularly postmodernism, in “Deconstruction’s Critics, the TV Scramble Effect, and the Fajita Pita Syndrome,” 85 Northwestern Law Review 119 (1990) and “Peirce and Critical Legal Studies,” in Peirce and Law (Kevelson ed. 1991, papers presented at the Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress, Harvard University, 1989). His book on corporate charter revocation, Challenging Corporate Rule (Apex Press 1999) has been called “pathbreaking, bold and provocative” by Howard Zinn. He was editor of the report by the Institute of Policy Studies “The War on Drugs: Addicted to Failure” (Washington, D.C. 2001). He wrote the entry on the “U’wa Indians of Colombia” for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (Continuum Press 2005). His book Great Winemakers of California (Capra Press 1977) dates from his days as a wine writer, and his comprehensive critique of wine labeling laws, “Regulation of American Wine Labeling: In Vino Veritas?” 11 University of California at Davis Law Review 115 (1978) was cited by the California Supreme Court in 2004, some 26 years after its publication.
Benson has been an active public interest lawyer over his entire career, providing pro bono counsel to environmental, human rights and social justice organizations. He has litigated occasionally, including before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights where he won a decision against the government of Mexico, but more frequently has lobbied, testified at legislative and administrative hearings, organized community actions, and initiated law reform proposals. He and his students drafted one of the first proposals to ban smoking in public places. He has served as an election observer for non-governmental organizations in Nicaragua and Mexico. He has been particularly active in the corporate accountability movement.