From The Symbols of Government, by Thurman W. Arnold. He was a Yale Law School professor and FDR’s trust-buster, and then a founder of the Washington mega-firm, Arnold & Porter.

This is the attitude of the so-called “legal mind.” Thomas Reed Powell of Harvard has described that attitude as follows: “If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”

Arnold and Powell were advocates of what is now called situationism. Back in law schools of their day it was was called “legal realism.” By the 1970s the same general approach had been reborn as “critical legal studies.”

P.S. An hour or so after posting this, I came across this on Politico. Now “legal realism” is being used by the GOP faithful as a stick to beat Sonia Sotomayor. Reality is always the enemy of religion — in this case the absurd religion of the law.

Posted by Jerome Doolittle at June 01, 2009 05:45 PM

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