The cultural study of law : reconstructing legal scholarship
"The Cultural Study of Law is the first full examination of what it means to conduct a modern intellectual inquiry into the culture of law. Charting the way for the development of a new intellectual discipline, Paul Kahn advocates an approach that stands outside law's normative framework and looks at law as a way of life rather than a set of rules." "To conduct a genuine study of our legal culture, we must step outside the boundaries of legal practice, forgo the ambition of reform, and instead interpret the founding myths and necessary beliefs that constitute the rule of law." "Drawing on philosophers from Plato to Foucault and cultural anthropologists and historians such as Clifford Geertz and Perry Miller, Kahn outlines the conceptual tools necessary for such an inquiry. He analyzes the concepts of time, space, citizen, judge, sovereignty, and theory within the culture of law's rule and goes on to consider the methodological problems entailed in stripping the study of law of its reformist ambitions."--Jacket
ix, 169 pages ; 24 cm
9780226422541, 9780226422558, 0226422542, 0226422550
40043655
Theory and practice
The state of the discipline
Imagining the rule of law
Methodological rules
Scholarship and law's power