Charles A. Reich papers

Charles Alan Reich was born in New York City in 1928. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1949 and attended the Yale Law School. During his time at Yale, Reich served as the editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After graduating in 1952, Reich served as a clerk for United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black from 1953 to 1954; later also befriending Justice William O. Douglas. After working as a lawyer for six years, Reich accepted an offer to join the Yale Law School faculty in 1960. He served as a professor from 1960 to 1974, teaching constitutional and administrative law, as well as authoring many legal articles, including The New Property, an examination of government-created wealth and its effects on individuals. Reich left Yale in 1974 and moved to San Francisco, California, having become fascinated by the youth counterculture movement there. While in San Francisco, he continued to write and teach law at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of San Francisco. Reich returned to Yale as a visiting professor from 1991 to 1994. Reich continued to live in San Francisco and died there in 2019.

Reich authored of several books. His most well-known work was his 1970 book The Greening of America, an examination and appreciation of the counterculture movement in the 1960s. The book forecasts what Reich saw as a fundamental shift in American society away from the worldviews of the 19th and early 20th centuries and into the worldview of the 1960s counterculture. The book was a success and elevated Reich into a position as a public intellectual, while also garnering criticism for his predictions and admiration for the counterculture movement. Reich also authored Garcia: A Signpost to New Space (1972) consisting of an Rolling Stone interview with himself and musician Jerry Garcia; the autobiographical work The Sorcerer of Bolinas Reef (1976); and Opposing the System (1995), examining what he saw as a societal breakdown in the twenty-five years since the publication of The Greening of America.