Laying Down the Law Mysticism, Fetishism, and the American Legal Mind [Paperback]

At a time when complaints are heard everywhere about the excesses of lawyers, judges, and law itself, Pierre Schlag focuses attention on the American legal mind and its urge to lay down the law. For Schlag, legalism is a way of thinking that extends far beyond the customary official precincts of the law.
His work prompts us to move beyond the facile self- congratulatory self-representations of the law so that we might think critically about its identity, effects, and limitations. In this way, Schlag leads us to rethink the identities and character of moral and political values in contemporary discourse. The book brings into question the dominant normative orientation that shapes so much academic thought in law and in the humanities and social sciences. By pulling the curtain on the rhetorical techniques by which the law represents itself as coherent, rational, and stable, Laying Down the Law discloses the grandiose (and largely futile) attempts of American academics to control social and political meaning by means of scholarly missives.

Pierre Schlag has been through the collapse of legal theory and lived to tell the tale, a tale that is burdened by as few illusions as possible except for the saving one of hope. He is also a great (and serious) comic. Pierre Schlag is the great iconoclast of the American legal academy. Few professors today are so consistently original, funny, and provocative. Schlag [has] established himself as one of the most creative thinkers in the contemporary legal academy. To read [these essays] one after another is exhilarating; Schlag's sophistication shines through. In chapter after chapter he tackles the most vexing problems of law and legal thinking.