Coming Home: [Commentary

Abstract

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. To its credit, the range of insight from this style of scholarship can be sweeping. Marianne Constable's essay, Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law,2 is an example of the escape and what it offers. We are brought into the spirit of law, carried from the West down to the East, and into the deep structures of the epistemology of legal ordering.3 Indeed, this kind of legal scholarship seems to have a soul, an inner presence barely capable of holding the anxiety and