On The Regrettable Decline of Law French: Or Shapiro Jettet Le Brickbat

Abstract

Whenever a distinguished scholar prescribes a new scholarly endeavor, we must imagine it as practiced not by him alone but by the academic multitudes and thus in its most vulgarized form. What follows is unashamedly worst-case analysis, but-present precincts excepted of course-the worst case is often enough the real case. It may be particularly unfair to subject Professor Stone's paper to this sort of analysis, in part because his own past work is in such excellent contrast to the tendencies I am about to denounce and in part because he himself sees the dangers and repeatedly warns against them. Against such considerations, however, must be counterbalanced the finding of so many of the participants in this symposium that, no matter what the signals offered by the intellectual leadership, the bulk of legal scholarship continues to focus on routine doctrinal analysis. Perhaps a handful of particularly subtle minds will be able to practice the sensitivity to for which Professor Stone calls without falling into arid self-contemplation, but I am more concerned with the place his paper will take in the overall movement of academic legal writing. Professor Stone's call for as a language may well be the first trumpet call of an essentially reactionary movement in legal scholarship, a retreat into the bowels of law from the various law and movements. Lawyers see the stream of law and sociology, law and politics, law and economics, law and psychology as fragmenting their scholarly core and corps. They do not want to bother mastering one and after another. They may not see great payoffs in the past ands. Here they are wrong, but the payoffs often have not been as great as the pioneering zealots have promised. In some instances, such as law and politics, the internalization of the and has been so great that the legal scholars have almost forgotten that it was an alien force they were absorbing.'