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Understanding The Recurrent Crisis In Legal Romanticism: Two Criteria For Coherent Doubt, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Broadly skeptical or relativistic criticisms of law and legal discourse, of the kind prevalent in the last generation in American legal scholarship, pose an inherent logic problem: they tend to impugn normativity itself just as much as they do their intended target. What seems amiss is that the act of critique is itself normative. However it is stated, and notwithstanding efforts by the critic to say otherwise, it is hard to see how the normativity implied in the very act of critique—indeed, in the very act of having purposes at all—is not at odds with the criticism itself.

As an …

Book Review: Postmodern Legal Movements: Law And Jurisprudence At Century's End By Gary Minda, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Postmodem Legal Movements does two things. First, the bulk of the book provides an overview of American jurisprudence, from Christopher Columbus Langdell to the present. This overview is necessary because, in order to understand "postmodem forms of jurisprudence, we must first explore what came before postmodernism, that is, modernism" (p. 5). Second, the relatively short latter portion of the book presents an argument about the current state of American legal scholarship and its future. Minda's picture of contemporary legal thought is that of a paradigm shift in the making.

Postmodern Legal Movements will prove useful to those in search of …

Freedom To Do What? Institutional Neutrality, Academic Freedom And Academic Responsibility, David R. Barnhizer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Our topic is whether law schools should remain institutionally neutral, presumably concerning the fundamental political and moral issues that besiege our society. The answer depends on several competing considerations, including one's concept of the university as either ivory tower or critical force obligated to serve the society that sustains it. I opt in the direction of the university as social force while also accepting the validity of the passive mode and seeing the dispassionate search for knowledge as a means to serve important human needs. The abstract formulation of the university as institutionally neutral is in many ways illusory because …