Law By Other Means

Abstract

Epistolary crisis, to borrow Derrida's colorful coinage, tends to accompany the breakdown or falling away of tradition, what he terms a crisis of destination. Attention to the question of form, to the hermeneutic issue of the specifically textual form of transmission, in other words, is a response to a substantive political crisis, that of the legitimacy of the subject-matter transmitted. To the extent that the humanistic reassertion of and literature is a movement, an intervention in the practice and pedagogy of legal scholarship, its trajectory over the last ten years can be analyzed best in relation to the short-term failure and longer term prospects of radical attempts to challenge the disciplinary closure or epistemic autonomy of law. From the earliest Roman schools, and the disputes between the anomalists and the grammarians are perhaps emblematic, the radical critique of law has always been formulated as some version of the critique of law as a discrete discipline or science. The axioms of legal dogmatics, and the second order theories of the purity of legal science or the abstraction of the normative doctrine of law, have all alike been subjected to scholarly challenge as ideological glosses, reification or occlusions, of a domain of practice in which legal powers, rights and duties were unevenly distributed. The vulnerable the worker, the woman, the foreigner, the minority were in this argument recipients of a equality and a substantive disenfranchisement. It is upon some version of this explicit theme that critical theories of law have initially taken their stand and have won whatever gains and suffered whatever losses that their history foretells. What is also apparent in a more contemporary context is that from the realists to the critical legal studies network, the political successes of radical movements for legal reform have been shaped by a pragmatism that has inevitably left the form of law, the autonomy of formal existence of juridical method fundamentally untouched. Legal pedagogy the law school experience as training for hierarchy or as means of becoming gentlemen remains a profoundly isolated and isolating induction into the discretely defensive world of the profession. The social and psy-