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21 Law & Soc. Inquiry 1007 (1996)
Rethinking Law Schools

handle is hein.journals/lsociq21 and id is 1017 raw text is: Rethinking Law Schools
William Twining
Replying to book reviews is a mug's game. Replying to Jack Schlegel is
rather like engaging in philosophical debate with Woody Allen when you
think that you both are agreeing and he disagrees.' Schlegel's review seems
to me to be generous and fair, especially if one ignores the reviewee's inten-
tions. The metaphor of talkin' dirty is a distinct improvement on suscep-
tibility to fashion or trendy as a way of expressing a sense of unease about
some tendencies in law school culture. I accepted the editor's invitation to
comment mainly in order to extend some aspects of the argument in Black-
stone's Tower to American law schools and only incidentally to put Schlegel
right.2
William Twining is Quain Professor of Jurisprudence, University College London. In
preparing this comment the author has benefited from conversations with Terry Anderson,
Marc Galanter, Rob Rosen, Jack Schlegel, and Robert Stevens and from discussions in
seminars at the University of Miami Law School and the National Law School of India
University at Bangalore.
1. See, for example, John Henry Schlegel, Talkin' Dirty: Twining's Tower and Kalman's
Strange Career, 21 Law & Soc. Inquiry 981, 985 n.5. There is no significant disagreement- my
account of the Realist Movement was constructed to give a context to a study of Llewellyn's
ideas. Subsequent research by others, including Schlegel, has told different, equally plausible,
and generally illuminating stories about the history of Realism. I have argued, like Schlegel,
that Realism is not a distinctive theory of law. However, Karl Llewellyn did have such a
theory, but he explicitly stated that realism was only one strand in his jurisprudence. The
distinction between Realism as a historical phenomenon (involving activity as much as
ideas), and realism as a concept not confined to the United States or a particular period is
significant. I have learned enormously from Schlegel's American Legal Realism and Empirical
Social Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995) (Schlegel, American
Legal Realism) and wish it had been available before I wrote. We may tell somewhat different
stories, but I find very little of substance to disagree with either historically or philosophically.
2. 1 shall resist the temptation to nitpick, but there is one point that warrants reply.
Schlegel takes me to task for vacillating about whether there is a core to the study of law and
in the end for selling out to the idea that legal doctrine is that core (above at 608). In fact I
think my position is almost identical to his as expressed in the last paragraph, bolstered by the
argument he advanced in his incisive article on the MacCrate report (Law and Endangered
Species: Is Survival Alone Cause for Celebration? 28 Ind. L.. 391 (1995). I would restate
the argument as follows: Rules do not delimit, define, or differentiate the discipline of law,
but they are indeed necessary and central to the study of law as they are in all normative
© 1997 American Bar Foundation.
0897-6546/96/2104-1007$01.00                                                  1007

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