Law Commons^™

Fear And Loathing Of Politics In The Legal Academy, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

In a recent lament about Bush v. Gore, Bruce Ackerman feared that the patent groundlessness of the opinion would convince many of a proposition he attributed to critical legal studies: that law is simply a form of politics.

This remark reflects two tendencies prominent at the Yale Law School in recent years: first, a preoccupation with a now extinct and never very successful movement of left legal academics, and second, a tendency to conflate this movement with the legal conservatism of Jusice Scalia and his collaborators at the University of Chicago and the Rehnquist Court.

These tendencies ride high …

The Mind In The Major American Law School, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal …