Customer Reviews

The Common Law Tradition: A Collective Portrait of Five Legal Scholars

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This is quite a substantial book comprised of five profiles of law professors who taught (at one time or another but principally in the 1960's) at the law school of the University of Chicago. The five are Edward H. Levi, who served not only ultimately as President of the University, but also Ford's Attorney General; Harry Kalven, Jr., the distinguished First Amendment scholar; Karl Llewellyn, a progenitor of "legal realism" and the UCC; Philip Kurland, the bombastic Frankfurter disciple and master of constitutional law; and Kenneth Culp Davis, the guru of administrative law. The author has not only done exceptional research on each individual, but apparently had personal contact with them while either a student of the law school or in other contexts. This makes for a highly informative approach.

The profiles vary in impact--those of Levy and LLewellyn(both exceptional individuals) are especially incisive and perceptive, the others less so. There are two concerns which I had in reading the book. First, much of the author's approach consists of discussing the principal publications of each subject. While this is valuable, after a while one almost begins to believe the book is a continuous book review. This is particularly true of the profiles of Kalven and (to a lesser extent) Kurland. On the other hand, the Davis profile really benefits from this approach, I thought. My second concern is that the author somehow wants to tie all five subjects to what he terms the "common law tradition." I am not sure he is fully successful in this endeavor, although with five such strong personalities this is no surprise. He also wants to persuade us that these five individuals had an approach to teaching and scholarship seriously at variance with their colleagues of today. I remain unpersuaded on this point as well. Nonetheless, a highly informative volume with considerable value and insight, with some staunchly conservative ideas thrown in for good measure.