Legal Theory and Linguistic Reality: A Critical Examination of Modern Legal Scholarship

To establish a starting point for the analysis, I begin by identifying and discussing the possible functions served by scholarship in a legal environment defined by the classic jurisprudence of natural law. I then consider the intellectual challenge posed to natural law jurisprudence by the modern Legal Realist movement and the consequences of that challenge for legal scholarship in particular. Lastly, I attempt to characterize the mainstream of current legal scholarship as a series of variations on two very basic intellectual responses to the modern Realist critique of established legal process and traditional legal scholarship