The strange career of legal liberalism

by Laura Kalman

Legal scholarship is in a state of crisis, argues Laura Kalman in this history of the most prestigious field in law studies, constitutional theory. Since the New Deal, Kalman says, most law scholars have identified themselves as liberals who believe in the power of the Supreme Court to effect progressive social change. In recent years, however, new political and interdisciplinary perspectives have undermined the tenets of legal liberalism, and liberal law professors have enlisted other disciplines in the attempt to legitimize their beliefs. Such prominent legal thinkers as Cass Sunstein, Bruce Ackerman, and Frank Michelman have incorporated the work of historians into their legal theories and arguments, turning to eighteenth-century republicanism - which stressed communal values and an active citizenry - to justify their goals. Kalman, a historian and a lawyer, suggests that reliance on history in legal thinking makes sense at a time when the Supreme Court repeatedly declares that it w