I. Law and Law and
Professor Posner's sketch has, I am sure, captured a widely shared view of the legal academy. In the foreground, behold a milling herd of well-groomed doctrinal analysts, curiously in decline. In the background, glimpse a gathering horde of slovenly social scientists and humanists practicing a bewildering variety of "law and . . ."s, surprisingly on the rise.
I think that this picture is misleading. Not that Professor Posner is wrong in thinking that something important is afoot. But it is a mistake to think of the change as a shift from doctrinal analysis to nondoctrinal musings. What is going on is a shift from one kind of doctrinal analysis to another kind of doctrinal analysis. Speaking very broadly, the newer sorts of analysis are characterized by a more selfconscious and elaborate conceptual apparatus than the kinds they are displacing. As a consequence, it is no surprise that the newer doctrinal analysts have been borrowing heavily from other parts of the university-where professors are paid to develop elaborate conceptual schemes for scientific empirical description and adequate normative evaluation. Yet the primary purpose of the modem law professor remains much as it was in the past: to provide disciplined methods for evaluating the flow of legal decisions and to train students in these methods so that they will intelligently practice them in their professional lives. Guido Calabresi is different from William Prosser; Frank Michelman is different from Alexander Bickel. But nothing is gained, and much is lost, by saying that Prosser and Bickel were doctrinal analysts, while Calabresi and Michelman are not.
Indeed, it is only when this stark contrast is abandoned that the genuinely important question appears: what precisely are the differences in analytic approach that divide the new generation of legal scholars from their predecessors?
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