• Login
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Yale
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    •   Home
    • Yale
    • Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of openYLSCommunitiesPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionPublication DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Statistics

    Display statistics

    Distorting Reason

    • CSV
    • RefMan
    • EndNote
    • BibTex
    • RefWorks
    Thumbnail
    Name:
    21_11YaleJL_Human529_1999_.pdf
    Size:
    627.2Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    Download
    Author
    Summers, C.
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.13051/7282
    Abstract
    Pierre Schlag, The Enchantment of Reason. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp. 160. $17.95. Judges, attorneys, academics, even law students, have all been caught within a spell - a spell of their own making. The leaders of the profession voice its incantation with pride: We are united by "a faith in the power of reason." This spell is insidious for it erases all knowledge of its own existence. At least this is what Pierre Schlag would have us believe in The Enchantment of Reason. Schlag claims to have seen through the mists of this illusion, and he presents a broad, skeptical argument that reason has betrayed the American legal community. Schlag's skepticism is not merely the now commonplace Holmesian position that "[the law] cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." It is a view that is affiliated with the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement, the more ambitious descendent of legal realism. Schlag takes as a starting point a central claim of the Critical theorists: All legal texts, theories, arguments, and positions are radically contextual in nature, and legal reasons are merely ad hoc or post hocrationalizations for prior "situated" beliefs. Schlag treats this claim as settled wisdom. The book, then, is best described as a reaction to the recalcitrant members of legal and philosophical academia who have remained loyal to liberal ideology and its commitment to reason. It seeks to explain to the Critical theorists why their colleagues remain unconvinced while at the same time it attempts finally to win over the holdouts. Schlag thus has both a descriptive and normative purpose when he argues that the resistance to CLS jurisprudence is due to - and thus a demonstration of - the same misplaced reliance upon reason that the Critical theorists have been insisting is pervasive all along.
    Collections
    Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities

    entitlement

     
    DSpace software (copyright © 2002 - 2023)  DuraSpace
    Quick Guide | Contact Us
    Open Repository is a service operated by 
    Atmire NV
     

    Export search results

    The export option will allow you to export the current search results of the entered query to a file. Different formats are available for download. To export the items, click on the button corresponding with the preferred download format.

    By default, clicking on the export buttons will result in a download of the allowed maximum amount of items.

    To select a subset of the search results, click "Selective Export" button and make a selection of the items you want to export. The amount of items that can be exported at once is similarly restricted as the full export.

    After making a selection, click one of the export format buttons. The amount of items that will be exported is indicated in the bubble next to export format.