Legal Commentary

This post is based only on anecdotal evidence, but I wonder if other prawfs have felt like students have gotten more cynical, and more inclined toward positivist accounts of law & judging, than before?  I've always thought I was more on the cynical side, and joined that view with a postmodernist understanding of how rhetoric (including that of "reason") can be deployed.   I love Philip Bobbitt's work in Constitutional Interpretation and Constitutional Fate, almost Talmudic in how it sees each issue from every side, and shows how every form of constitutional argumentation can be used for just about any substantive position.  (Here's an interesting exchange on that subject on Concurring Opinions.)

But, again just based on my own experience, it seems like my students are more cynical and positivistic than I ever was.  Recently, when asked if Supreme Court justices were trying to "do the law" on First Amendment issues or justify a substantive result they wanted, not a single member of one of my classes argued for the former.  I've seen this time and again in other contexts -- sometimes I find it hard to persuade students that legal reasoning is anything more than rationale.  Have others had this experience?  Or am I just getting old and crotchety?

re