Reviews for The strange career of legal liberalism

The average rating for The strange career of legal liberalism based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-02-05 00:00:00 Will Sleeper "As with pornography, Warren and his colleagues might know justice when they saw it. But to many legal scholars, it seemed that the Warren Court had not produced objective criteria for justice. With a chief justice who might not pursue the politics of the Warren Court or law professors, legal realism now seemed dangerously unprincipled." (57-8) "In a widely publicized 1983 speech, [Duke Law School Dean Paul] Carrington suggested that such individuals [nihilist crits] had 'an ethical duty to depart the law school, perhaps to seek a place elsewhere in the academy.' As Carrington admitted, his were tough words 'within a university, whose traditions favor the inclusion in house of all honestly held ideas, beliefs and values. When, however, the university accepted responsibility for training professionals, it also accepted a duty to constrain teaching that knowingly dispirits students or disables them from doing the work for which they are trained.'" (121) "'[I]t is not a lot of fun watching people shoot fish in barrels; indeed, one sometimes begins to develop sympathy for both the fish, who are doing the best they can under trying circumstances, and for their pursuers, who are doing the only thing they know how to do.'" (quoting Mark Tushnet, 179-80) "'Our distance from the founders makes translation necessary; what we have in common with them makes translation worthwhile.'" (quoting H. Jefferson Powell, 236)

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-25 00:00:00 James Rizza Laura Kalman does a fine job of takin readerss from the end of the "legal realist" movement (as described, inter alia, in Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960 and Kalman's own Legal Realism at Yale) through the "process school" of Hart, Sacks, and Frankfurter and on to the present fractured state of legal scholarship. Kalman discusses how many law school professors--most of whom have the JD and nothing else--have co-opted and perhaps misused the work of JGA Pocock, Gordon Wood, Richard Rorty, and many others. In addition to describing the crisis of legitimacy that the law schools have faced (are they trainers of "Hessians" or serious academics?), Kalman also offers concise summaries of major works by Bickel, Hart Ely, Michelman, Dworkin, Amar, Ackerman, and many others. If you're looking for a single work that will familiarize with the state of the field, this is the one to read.