A while back, a prominent law review asked me to review a book on a topic of interest to me. I readily agreed, on condition that the review be relatively short. When it came time to sit down and read the book, however, I found it extremely difficult to understand; the book was loaded with […]
Archive | Legal Scholarship
The Rise of the Uncorporation
Congratulations to Larry Ribstein on his new book from OUP, The Rise of the Uncorporation. I somehow got a comp copy in the mail, just finished reading it, and it is terrific. A gracefully written essay on business law!(!!) It manages to meld together law, history of business and legal forms in business, law and […]
Kevin Jon Heller on Carl Schmitt and Nuremberg
Over at Opinio Juris, my co-blogger Kevin Jon Heller has a post on the German political theorist Carl Schmitt and the history behind his brush with a Nuremberg prosecution at the end of the Second World War. It is drawn from research for Kevin’s book on the Nuremberg trials; given the interest that law professors […]
Tamanaha, “Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide”
I recently finished Brian Tamanaha’s new book, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging. I thought it was excellent: well-written, provocative, and engaging. If you’re interested in jurisprudence, this book is a must-read. The gist of the argument is that the common story about the legal realists and the legal formalists is […]
Copenhagen as UN Politics, Not Climate Change Substance
By Kenneth Anderson on December 19, 2009 2:42 pm in Climate Change, Collective Action Problems, International Law, Legal Scholarship
(Updated below … Give me global oligopoly or give me climate death!) I Post-Copenhagen. At bottom, the question is legitimacy. The global New Class met in Copenhagen, convinced, as ever, that it had legitimacy to act as it proposed to act, with the UN as its vehicle, because legitimacy was conferred by “expertise.” The UN […]
Rethinking Blogging-as-Scholarship
Back in 2005 and 2006, a lot of law-professor bloggers wondered whether blog posts could and would serve as ways to advance scholarly ideas about law. At the time, I was very skeptical: Can blogs help advance legal scholarship? I think the answer is that they can, but that the format isn’t well-suited for the […]
McDonald amicus: Don’t trust Fairman and Berger
By David Kopel on November 23, 2009 11:39 pm in Constitutional History, Fourteenth Amendment, Legal Scholarship, Supreme Court
Erik S. Jaffe has written a very interesting brief for the CalGuns Foundation. In short, the argument is: “Charles Fairman’s and Raoul Berger’s Work on Fourteenth Amendment Incorporation of the Bill of Rights Is Deeply Flawed, Inaccurate, and Should Not Be Relied Upon by this Court.” To make a long story short, during the latter half of […]
Reading While Traveling, Hard Copy and No Internet
By Kenneth Anderson on November 14, 2009 4:29 pm in Academia, Counter-Terrorism Policy, Economy, Finance, Financial Crisis, Freedom of Speech, International Human Rights Law, International Law, Legal Professor, Legal Scholarship, Robotics, Targeted Killing, Terrorism
I’ve been traveling recently, and so have been away from posting. One of the enforced virtues of traveling – one of the few virtues of traveling for me these days – is the plane flight with no internet. And if the big guy in front of me reclines his seat, as he always does, I […]
The Role of the Audience in Legal Writing
In an interesting post on the goals of legal scholarship, Marc DeGirolami writes: [It] doesn’t particularly matter to me who is or is not interested in my ideas. It probably is true that I hope vaguely that someone, somewhere, now or in the future, will be interested in them. If no one ever thought them […]