Private Law Theory

“As Shyam mentioned in his post of May 8th, Christopher Columbus Langdell is widely taken to be the archformalist of the nineteenth century and Exhibit A of a deplorable ‘Classical Legal Thought’ with its would-be deductive ‘science’ of law. Recently, commentators such as Tony Sebok and Brian Tamanaha have argued that the formalist era was not as formalist is it appeared. Mostly the controversies over this revisionism swirl around realist-sounding pronouncements of courts and commentators of the common law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries …” (more)

[Henry Smith, New Private Law, 10 August]

First posted 2015-08-10 06:06:50