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American legal thought has progressed remarkably quickly from premodernism to modernism and into postmodernism in little over two hundred years, running from the nation's founding through today. This book tells the story of this mercurial journay jurisprudence by showing the development of legal thought through these three intellectual periods. Feldman's narrative revolves around two broad interrelated themes: jurisprudential foundations and the idea of progress. Comprehensive and accessible, the book draws on significant cases from Supreme Court history to provide a handy one-volume overview for law students, practitioners, and legal scholars.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Acknowledgments(p. vii)
• 1 Introduction: On Intellectual History(p. 3)
• 2 Charting Intellectual Waters: Premodernism, Modernism, and Postmodernism(p. 11)
• 3 Premodern American Legal Thought(p. 49)
• 4 Modern American Legal Thought(p. 83)
• 5 Postmodern American Legal Thought(p. 137)
• 6 Conclusion: A Glimpse of the Future?(p. 188)
• Notes(p. 199)
• Index(p. 263)

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CHOICE Review

Feldman traces American legal thought through three phases: premodern, modern, and postmodern, focusing on leading thinkers and the social, economic, and political contexts in which they wrote. He explains his approach and devotes a chapter to each of the phases. The premodern era extended from the Declaration of Independence to the Civil War and was characterized by belief in natural law, the attainability of a legal science, and eschatologically conceived progress. Feldman dates the modern period from after the Civil War until the 1960s. It began with Christopher Langdell's search for objectivity and moved to the positivist relativism of the realists, who were in turn supplanted by a pluralist emphasis on legal processes. These modernist conceptions of jurisprudence have since the 1960s been threatened by postmodernism, to which Feldman assigns eight defining attributes. Though the book is rigorously structured, Feldman portrays the antifoundational and unsettled qualities of postmodernism positively and, with the use of terms such as "doodad," "doohickey," and "gizmos," he tries to get into the postmodern mode. The presentation of legal ideas is organized and useful, but attempts to tie these to broader contexts are cursory and superficial. The endnotes will be valuable to those wishing to delve more deeply into American legal thought. General, undergraduate, and graduate collections. R. Heineman; Alfred University

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Stephen M. Feldman is at University of Tulsa.