Academic

Anderson on the Two Cultures of Legal Scholarship

By Lawrence Solum

Check out Ken Anderson's The 'New Two Cultures' of Legal Scholarship: The Humanities and Social Science (A Note to Joe Singer) on Opinio Juris.  Here is a taste:

Fifty years ago, in the late 1950s, C.P. Snow published that famous essay decrying the gap that had grown up in his day between the culture of the humanities, on the one hand, and the physical sciences, on the other. The professors of the humanities were ignorant of science and basic facts about the technology of their own day, and above all they were innumerate. The scientists, for their part, had very little interest in the liberal arts, in literature, in philosophy (outside of mathematical logic). It seems to me that something like this divide of the ?two cultures? is emerging in legal scholarship ? not between the humanities and physical science, of course, but between modes of explanation and method in legal scholarship, between the humanities and social science. Call it the 'new two cultures'.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 24, 2008 (boomark / email).