The Strange Death of the American Front Porch: Molly Brady on Land, Law, and the Lost Art of Neighborliness

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. I think everybody should be pleased that we're over July 4th, no more 250 year anniversary shows. But of course, the show goes on, America goes on, and America remains unfinished. A couple of months ago, we had the Harvard Law Scholar, Alexandra Natapoff on the show. She has edited a new book appropriately called America Unfinished, 250 Years of Law and Governance, which is made up of contributions from professors. At Harvard Law School, and I thought it would be good, given that we're over the 250th, to talk about America, continue to talk about America Unfinished. My guest today is Molly Brady, another professor at the Harvard Law School. According to her ex-page, she's always half joking. Although, Molly, I'm not sure you were half joking in your piece, were you?

**Molly Brady** (1:29)
That's true. I think it was a relatively serious look for me, that I think why I study the things I do and why I think they matter at this moment.

**Andrew Keen** (1:38)
I know there's a personal element to the piece that you wrote about America Unfinished in Natapoff's volume. So perhaps you might introduce yourself. Tell me a little bit about where you were born and how your own narrative fits into what you wrote in this volume.

**Molly Brady** (1:54)
Yeah, sure. So I grew up in Utica, New York, which is along the old Erie Canal in upstate New York, really true upstate New York, not just sort of north of New York City. And I think that even when I was in law school, I realized that the subjects that I was most drawn to were those that I had seen affecting my life in Utica. So topics like fracking, abandoned housing, urban renewal, these were all things that I remember seeing when I was growing up. And so I think they led me a little bit toward property law, which studies all those things and towards city development. And this is a part of the country, I think, also, which is in the Rust Belt, seeing a lot of economic decline.

**Andrew Keen** (2:41)
So did you, and I don't want to pigeonhole you and tell me, I'm not your student, so I probably can't get into too much trouble. You can grade me low. But did you have a JD Vance style? I know you also like Vance, graduated from Yale Law School. Did you have a JD Vance style childhood? Probably not quite as extreme, I would guess.

**Molly Brady** (3:03)
No, not quite as extreme. We were actually at Yale Law School at the same time, so tiny world. But I did not. And I would say that I was very aware of the economic circumstances that were depressing my area. And I think when I left, I was aware that a lot of people that I was going to school with, I went to Harvard College, had no sense of, I think, upstate New York or the Rust Belt or sort of what people were thinking about. So I think in that way, there was perhaps some commonalities, some effort to sort of say there are other places that are struggling with real problems.
But nothing nearly so severe as, as I thought would be really common.

**Andrew Keen** (3:42)
But JD, of course, leveraged, if that's the right word, his own background into best-selling book and political and legal career. Were you from relatively unprivileged circumstances? How did you make yourself, so to speak, go into Harvard as an undergrad, Yale Law, and now a tenured faculty, young tenured faculty at Harvard, which is, of course, the pinnacle of any academic legal career?

**Molly Brady** (4:10)
I appreciate the young bit.
No, I was not underprivileged in any way. I grew up in a suburban upbringing mostly. I was born in Syracuse, raised a bit in Utica, and then my parents, like many parents, took us to the suburbs nominally for schools. And so it was not underprivileged in any way, but I do think was sort of colored also by growing up in a place where people had really different political opinions. It was a red place in a blue state, and I've subsequently lived in lots of different kinds of places, but I think I kind of took for granted the amount of disagreement that people in my area were kind of coming up with.

**Andrew Keen** (4:56)
So the title of Natapoff's book, which you contribute to, is America Unfinished. But I'm guessing where you grew up, America was, I mean, the problem is it wasn't unfinished, but it was finished. We're talking about a post-industrial world. Is that fair?