Duellism in Modern American Jurisprudence
Posted: 28 Aug 2000
Abstract
In his body of work, most recently exhibited in The Enchantment of Reason and Laying Down the Law: Mysticism, Fetishism, and the American Legal Mind, Professor Pierre Schlag contends that law fails to signify anything real and, thus, does not exist. From this follows Schlag's pugnacious attack on the legal practitioner as a distorted subject, the law professor and the judge as tools of an oppressive legal bureaucracy, and legal scholarship as a worthless pursuit. In this Review Essay, Professor David Gray Carlson attempts to vindicate the practice of law and of legal scholarship. Using the perspectives of Hegel and Lacan, Carlson shows that while law may have a complicated relation to justice, law nevertheless exists. With law so defended, Professor Carlson makes the case that we should not and could not, as Schlag suggests, "lay down the law."
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