Roberto Mangabeira Unger LL.M. 70 S.J.D.

76, the Roscoe Pound

Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, has been appointed the Minister of
Strategic Affairs in Brazil by the countrys president, Dilma Rousseff.
Unger held the same position in the Brazilian cabinet from 2007-2009, when
he served in the administration of Luiz Incio Lula da Silva.
Brazil has a long tradition of public intellectuals whose careers oscillate
between academics and politics. One of the classic failures of philosophers is
a belief someone else will do it for you, Unger told the Financial Times in an
October 2014interview. In that interview, he described his decision to accept
his first appointment as Minister of Strategic Affairs as a way of forcibly
removing my protective armour and opening myself to the arrows of failure,
derision, defeat...and thus transformation. Without that, you die slowly
and I believe you should only die once.
In 1971, Unger was appointed to the faculty at HLS, where he was an early
leader of the Critical Legal Studies movement and wrote the tract that became
known as one of its principal manifestos. He became a social theorist and
critic with a body of work that covered not just law but also art, religion,
politics, philosophy and economics. Author of more than a dozen books,
Unger published the three-volumePolitics: A Work in Constructive Social
Theory, Cambridge University Press, in 1987.
His most recent book calls for a revolution in physics. In The Singular
Universe and the Reality of Time, (Cambridge University Press, 2015), cowritten with physicist Lee Smolin, Unger argues that, to keep cosmology
scientific, we must replace the old view in which the universe is governed by
immutable laws by a new one in which laws evolve.

Unger was sworn in on February 5, in Brazil, and has taken a leave of absence
from his professorship at HLS.