Schlegel on the Great Recession and Recent Legal Thought

John Henry Schlegel, SUNY Buffalo Law School, has posted . . . and Law, which is forthcoming in In Search of Contemporary Legal Thought, ed. Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins:

The locution “law and . . . (some other discipline)” implicitly asserts the primacy of legal doctrine and institutions narrowly conceived for coming to understand phenomena in which law takes a part. The ordinary story of American legal theory – formalism then realism then contemporary legal thought – can be understood to repeat the triumphalism implicit in “law and . . .”. Of course, the story of American legal theory could possibly be read differently -- as a series of responses to the inability of law to dictate the terms of its use and so as evidence law’s subordination to other ways of understanding such phenomena. Such a possibility would dictate a different ordering of important words into “. . .and Law.” This paper attempts to examine the plausibility of the latter locution by examining some of the crucial bodies of knowledge and recurrent actions of putatively non-legal actors that led up to the no longer recent Great Recession.

H/t: Legal Theory Blog, where my Georgetown Law colleague Lawrence Solum adds: “Fascinating.  I especially recommend this short and readable paper for younger legal scholars from whom the developments in legal theory in the 1980s and early 1990s are ‘history.’”