The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship

The Cultural Study of Law: Reconstructing Legal Scholarship. Paul W. Kahn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 169 pp.

Professor Kahn appears to have two goals in mind in The Cultural Study of Law. The first is to call for a broader, less concrete, and more intellectual alternative to contemporary legal scholarship. The second is to outline the sort of study, theoretical and substantive, that he hopes will replace the reformist efforts that now engage most legal academics.

In the introduction and first chapter, Kahn describes the primary aim of his book as convincing law professors to "turn ... away from the project of legal reform" (p. 1) and to devote themselves to the cultural study of law. To effect this shift, scholars must refrain from "participat[ing] in the practice of law" (p. 7), since the "collapse of the distinction between the subject studying the law and the legal practice that is the object of study is the central weakness of contemporary legal scholarship" (p. 7). Thus, Kahn concludes, "[a] new discipline of legal study must abandon the project of reform" (p. 7).

Kahn's proposal is unlikely to convince most law professors. (And anthropologists do not need convincing.) While law professors have been interested in "law and. . ." studies (e.g., law and economics, law and literature) during the past few decades, for the most part, they aim to teach students a trade-the practice of law-and do not care to define themselves as entirely external to that practice. On the other hand, few would object to the notion that legal scholarship of the sort Kahn recommends has a place-both within law schools and within the university more generally-alongside the more prosaic, openly reformist effort...