A few years ago, I had occasion to observe that:
I've never met Pierre Schlag, a constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado, but at a distance he seems like a very interesting guy. One of his books, for example, has been described as reading:
... as if it were written by an alienated central European intellectual smoking bad cigarettes in a cheap urban room and getting a lot off his chest. Reason in law is a sham. It cannot be anything but a sham, and, since in liberal culture reason is the basis of law’s authority, liberal versions of law are and always will be shams. Reason can only be understood as a modest and inherently skeptical enterprise, one deeply incompatible with political rule. The rule of law is rule by the beliefs of those in power. Reason is merely power’s rhetorical cover. It signifies nothing, at least nothing honorable. ... Readers must know their Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Nussbaum as well as their H.L.A. Hart, Dworkin, and Sunstein to follow the argument.
We corporate law types don't run into Foucault very often and I could go the rest of my career quite contentedly without reading any more articles by or about Dworkin. Yet, having said that, I occasionally aspire to being an alienated Anglophile intellectual smoking bad cigars and drinking red plonk in some cheap Paris cafe. So that's a common bond right there.
I mention this because Schlag is now co-authoring a new blog called "brazenandtenured–law politics nature and culture". In his email announcing the blog, he wrote that:
It's on law, politics, nature and culture. It will contain mini-essays, commentaries, and experimental-idea pieces on all these subjects (and perhaps more.) We’re trying to redeem through example and experimentation the idea that law is part of the liberal arts.
I suspect I won't agree with very many of the normative and political claims advanced in the new blog, but early returns suggest that it's going to be well written, interesting, and provocative. Should be a good read, so I'm blogrolling it.
