ELC 2025: Staring Into the Legal Void by Rebecca Bratspies
“down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way, till a void boundless as a nether sky appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees, and hung over this immensity; but I said: “If you please, we will commit ourselves to this void, and see whether Providence is here also.”
--William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
When we gathered in New York this July it was under a very red sky. The Trump administration was quickly dismantling our collective life work. Indeed, just weeks after our meeting U.C. Irvine Professor Alex Camacho called Trump the “worst president for the environment in U.S. history.” There we were, at the Edith Macy Center—a group of law professors in a Girl Scout retreat—staring at the wreckage, and trying to recommit to the void by rethinking law entirely.
I was part of the Rethinking Business group. We convened in a room named after management consultant Peter Drucker. Since Peter Drucker is widely proclaimed as a “visionary whose ideas reshaped management, business, and society” this seemed either propitious or ironic, depending on one’s inclinations. I confess mine tend toward the cynical. Was it even possible to rethink business in a room named for a management guru whose claim to fame was as the father of modern management?
And yet, it turns out there was much more to Peter Drucker than efficiency. Drawing on his early exposure to Nazi fascism he wrote extensively about what happens when converging crises expose social institutions to be a façade. Drucker described what happened when “the people” discovered that behind the façade was only a vacuum—fear and trauma led them to turn to what he called “the abracadabra of fascism” thereby substituting creed and order for freedom and equality. As Drucker described it, fascism was an end run around the hard work of building a new, better society. Sound familiar?
For Drucker, the antidote to this kind of social breakdown was stable, responsible institutions. Institutions that were more than a mere façade. His (pretty conservative) ideas about the need to restore community and his commitment to a kind of industrial democracy seems almost radically progressive today. Contrast Drucker’s conviction that there should not be too large an ‘inequality of income between the lowest-paid people and the people in charge’ with today’s self-important billionaires busily dismantling higher education, functioning government, and most social institutions in search of tax cuts (and because they believe it when their mommies declare them to be geniuses.)
Drucker dismissed shareholder primacy and the sole focus on profit maximization as not only antisocial but immoral. When asked if big business was a good role model for good government his response was “no, of course not.” He rejected the idea that a free market is all it takes to have a functioning society—or even a functioning economy—as pure delusion.
Drucker may have made his reputation and fortune in management, but he considered himself a social ecologist—someone who “envisions a moral economy that moves beyond scarcity and hierarchy, toward a world that reharmonizes human communities with the natural world, while celebrating diversity, creativity and freedom.” That sounded exactly like what we were struggling with in our breakout group.
And yet, even as we were grappling with this core question, we seemed unable to shake the limits Drucker’s ghost imposed: His commitment to a free market economy; His opposition to regulation and taxation as tools to limit corporate greed; His belief in the role of the entrepreneur and the dominance of the customer; His conviction that property was a source of legitimacy. Drucker’s widely adopted vision of corporate freedom constricted us, even as his clear-sighted anti-fascism inspired us. We struggled to think past shareholder primacy and to shed the neoliberal straight-jacket that allows corporate persons to become unaccountable transnational actors spouting grandiose but unenforceable ESG measures. Perhaps it was no surprise that our Drucker room brainstorming session produced ideas that Professor Melissa Powers charitably described as “modest.”
Did it matter that our meeting in the Peter Drucker room took place at the Edith Carpenter Macy Center? Maybe. Edith Carpenter Macy was a staggeringly wealthy woman whose fortune came from the fossil fuel industry. She and her husband V. Everit Macy lived lives of immense privilege, vacationing on Jekyll’s Island and hobnobbing with the rich and mighty. And yet, as active progressives, Macy and her husband also worked closely with the Henry Street Settlement and were deeply involved in local poverty alleviation efforts. Both served on multiple community organization boards, volunteering their time as well as their money. In eulogizing her at the 1925 International Girl Scout Conference that opened the Edith Macy Center, Dr. James Russell, dean of Columbia’s Teachers College remarked “it is said you know that some of us are born with silver spoons in our mouths. And I suppose it could be said of her (Macy) but there are not many in this world who use those spoons to feed the hungry multitude.”
While there was an overwhelming noblesse oblige flavor to some of her activities, Macy seems to have really made a difference. Her involvement with the Girl Scouts began with a generous monetary donation. That first contribution led her headlong into the hard work of building and leading the new organization. Herself a suffragist, Macy’s first act as leader of the Girl Scouts (a position she held from 1919 until her death in 1925) was to get girls and young women involved in the campaign to pass the 19th Amendment. Unlike so many of the ultra-rich today, Macy turned her privilege into tool—leveraging her wealth and influence toward building a better, fairer society with more opportunities for more people. When Macy died suddenly in 1925, her husband created the Macy Center in her honor—donating the land and funds so the Girl Scouts would have a world-class training center. To this day the Macy Center provides that service.
A generation after Macy’s death, Peter Drucker became an avid supporter of the Girl Scouts. He viewed the organization as “remarkable.” In a society “that pretends to care about its children but does not” Drucker saw the Girl Scouts giving every girl the chance to learn and grow and thrive. The Girl Scouts, in turn, incorporated Peter Drucker’s leadership ideas into their mission and have long extended their welcome to “anyone who identifies as a girl.” Today Troop 600 reaches girls living in NYC shelters, as well as immigrant and asylum seeking girls—enfolding them into wider the Girl Scout community and offering them the same activities, opportunities, and training available to other New York girls.
A collaboration between Peter Drucker and former Girl Scout CEO, resulted in an initiative intended to “redefin[e] the social sector as an equal partner in business and government.” This organization, now called the Francis Hesselbein Leadership Institute, involved melding their missions in an attempt to transform the world by “developing responsible leaders, caring citizens, and a healthy, diverse and inclusive society.” That sounds a lot like the same questions we were grappling with in July 2025.
Hmmm. Focusing on youth involvement, leveraging privilege for social change, rejecting fascism, and emphasizing commitment to social institutions? Maybe meeting in the Peter Drucker room at the Edith Macy Center was less ironic and more inspirational after all. While we obviously need to rethink their solutions and question the first principles that so limited our ability to brainstorm, we can certainly learn from their commitment to building a better world. In a time when we so desperately need hope, their accomplishments provide a welcome reminder that individual creativity, and vision, paired with social solidarity can make a real difference—even in times of great social turmoil. As we try to recreate environmental law in this era of federal lawlessness, this reminder is both timely and inspiring.
Rebecca Bratspies is the Oliver Houck Chair in Environmental Law and Professor of Law at Tulane University Law School.