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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Christine B. Harrington and
John Brigham
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Extract

Ever since the formation of an academic bar, one which left the “practical world” of apprentices and clerkships barely 100 years ago, the architects of law's intellectual life have looked outside the canons of lawyers' law to academic life and its deep thinkers for stimulation. From the German social scientists of Pound's time to Foucault in our own, the erotica of the legal academy have often been drawn from French and German philosophers and social theorists. There may be, in fact, a pattern to this inclination in America to draw insights from the “wild passion” of the French or the “dark terror” of the Germans. There is certainly an ongoing effort to avoid England in both its commonness and its construction of the “savage” or the ethnographically primitive “other” on which English law based its authority for so long. American sociolegal intellectuals, as part of the legal academy, crave a hit of the “other” on the continent of Europe, having denuded the American forests of its native occupants.

Information

Type
Article Commentary
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , Summer 1994, pp. 599 - 603
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1994 

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References

1 Peter Fitzpatrick, The Mythology of Modem Law (London: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar

2 19 Law & Soc. Inquiry 551 (1994).Google Scholar

3 For a similar treatment of Foucault and Walzer, see Constable, “Foucault & Walzer: Sovereignty, Strategy & the State,” 24 Policy 269 (1991).Google Scholar

4 See Nietzsche (1888), “Twilight of the Idols: or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer,” in W. Kaufman, The Portable Nietzsche 485 (New York: Viking Press, 1954). Constable cites this section of Twilight of the Idols in the beginning of her essay, but her translation reads a little differently from ours: “How the ‘Real World’ at Last Became a Myth.”Google Scholar

5 Unger, Roberto, “Critical Legal Studies,” 96 Harv. L. Rev. 561 (1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Brigham, John & Harrington, Christine B., “Realism and Its Consequences: An Inquiry into Contemporary Sociological Research,” 17 Int'l J. Soc. L. 41 (1989).Google Scholar

7 These are debates that have arisen in feminist thought, gay and lesbian scholarship, and in the critique of rights on the left that led to the emergence of Critical Race Theory.Google Scholar

8 See Christine B. Harrington & Barbara Yngvesson, “Interpretive Sociolegal Research,” 14 Law & Soc. Inquiry 135 (1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Alan Hunt, Explorations in Law and Society (New York: Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

10 “Although affirming ‘science as a tool of persuasion’ in a discussion of ‘pos-tempiricist’ scholarship in 1990, Sarat turns a year later with Kearns to interpretive critics who reject social science.” Constable, p. 235.Google Scholar

11 This paradigmatic move, involving some of the same actors, is described in Harrington & Yngvesson, 14 Law & Soc. Inquiry at 137.Google Scholar

12 Valerie Kerriush, Jurisprudence as Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992); John Brigham, The Cult of the Court 94 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

13 From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Constable, p. 239.Google Scholar