Marx Not Madison: The Crisis of American Legal Education

This book is about the moral and political drift of American legal education. Chapter 1 begins with a review of Critical Legal Studies which is seen as symptomatic of the larger problem. Chapter 2 notes the importance of legal education as the last formal education American statesmen are likely to receive. Chapter 3 considers the current American legal curriculum and concludes that the teaching of law in general comports broadly with the teaching of Critical Legal Studies noting the same disregard for the Constitution as fundamental law, the same contempt for individualism, the same assault on the possibility of truth coupled with the same inchoate faith in future. Chapter 4 presents a history of American legal education from Blackstone to Holmes concluding that the positivist Holmes was instrumental to our present predicament. Chapter 5 reviews the history of positivism altogether focusing on Holmes’ teachers, Austin and Hobbes, and their ideologic opponents, Acquinas and Aristotle, and asking whether Hobbes and his materialism do not finally account for the principles of the American regime. Noting some preliminary evidence that those principles go beyond Hobbes, Chapter 6 concludes that we cannot answer that question definitively without a close reading of the thought of the Founders. The book closes by advocating such a reading in our nation’s law schools and includes, to that end, a proposed course syllabus.