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The Cultural Study of law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship By Paul W Kahn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 169 pp., $27.50 (cloth)
The number of scholars whose ambition is to found a new discipline can perhaps be counted on one hand. With the publication of The Cultural Study of Law, Yale Law Professor, Paul Kahn must now be counted among them. Yet, one pitfall of inventing (or "reconstructing, "to use the more modest term) a new discipline-particularly one as expansive as Kahn's, "which knows no limits"-is that, in an age of rapidly proliferating and highly specialized knowledge, certain established concepts and methodologies relevant to the new discipline are bound to be overlooked, and thus reinvented, albeit in different guise. This is certainly the case with Kahn's proposed new intellectual discipline that examines the social meaning of the rule of law. It is understandable, therefore, that Kahn would pass over important theoretical perspectives (autopoiesis and social constructionism come readily to mind) that would doubtless have added conceptual rigor to his study of the culture of the rule of law; but to disregard the entirety of the sociology of law, as Kahn has done, amounts to nothing less than intellectual negligence. What is more, excluding legal sociology's theoretical contributions serves only to exacerbate Kahn's unnecessary reinvention of certain key concepts and methods.
His sins of omission aside, Kahn has nonetheless managed, by fits and starts, to assemble a bare-boned, but highly useful, outline of a critical cultural inquiry of law. He begins by noting that legal scholarship in the United States has never been much of an intellectual discipline. This, Kahn explains, is due largely to the fact that law, taught as it is in the mode of the professional school, has been almost wholly unconcerned with such issues of meaning as who we are and what it is that the law makes us. Instead, American jurisprudence has always been a highly practical endeavor largely preoccupied with having an impact on the political order; that is to say, it has always had an obsessive concern with reform.
Kahn further contends that our deepest cultural commitment-the rule of law-is particularly characterized by a dedication to reform. Moreover, since reform always occurs within law's rule, the reform of law...