This volume is not for the faint of heart. If the names Llewellyn, Fuller, Coarse, Calabresi or Kennedy (Duncan, rather than any member of the political family) are not known to you, this might not be the book for you. It purports to offer the twenty-one articles that are most important to the practice of law today. These, we are told, are the articles that anyone in the American legal academy ought to know. Whilst Holmes, Dewey and Dworkin are also included here, most of the authors will be unknown outside American law schools. In the introduction, the editors argue that law students will find this collection useful, as will with their teachers. That may be true at elite law schools and among the very brightest students, but for most these erudite offerings are better characterized as sophisticated “extras” that give a much deeper intellectual background to the law than is necessary to pass law exams or the bar.

The first section, entitled “Attacking the Old Order,” includes a half-dozen essays written during the fifty years before World War II and is led by Holmes. Section II includes just three essays, written in 1941, 1958, and 1959, that outline a “new order” known in the trade as “legal process.” The third section, revealingly entitled “The Emergence of Eclecticism,” includes the remaining twelve essays and acts as a largely themeless overview of current legal thought in various areas. The balance, in favour of recent essays, suggests that, far from canonical, this collection might be better termed as a survey of the current state of affairs in American legal thought, as many are of too recent a vintage so that we cannot tell if they are timeless or merely time-dated.

Each article is introduced by a substantial essay that includes some biographical material, as well as a summary of where it fits in the development of legal thought in the United States and an extensive bibliography of all relevant materials. So while this specialized and sophisticated compendium is not light summer reading, it is for the interested scholar with some legal background who wants a survey of contemporary American legal thought and the grounding to take that interest further.