Coming Home
Ever since the formation of an academic bar, one which left the “practical world” of apprentices and clerkships barely 100 years ago, the architects of law's intellectual life have looked outside the canons of lawyers' law to academic life and its deep thinkers for stimulation. From the German social scientists of Pound's time to Foucault in our own, the erotica of the legal academy have often been drawn from French and German philosophers and social theorists. There may be, in fact, a pattern to this inclination in America to draw insights from the “wild passion” of the French or the “dark terror” of the Germans. There is certainly an ongoing effort to avoid England in both its commonness and its construction of the “savage” or the ethnographically primitive “other” on which English law based its authority for so long. American sociolegal intellectuals, as part of the legal academy, crave a hit of the “other” on the continent of Europe, having denuded the American forests of its native occupants.