Sotomayor, Obama, and Ideology

I am among what must be a million or so people who receive e-mail messages from President Obama. They come addressed to “David” and are signed “President Barack Obama.” The most recent concerned the Sotomayor nomination and included an earnest four-minute video in which the President offered his reasons for the nomination.

I found the video impressive for various reasons. The President of course comes across as photogenic, genuine, and articulate. My goodness, he did not muff a single word! He also is a superb ideologue. In discussing the Sotomayor nomination, he skillfully invokes the importance of hard work, the rags-to-riches myth, the notion of a neutral rule of law, and assorted other staples of the dominant ideology. The President also assures us that the nominee herself is not an ideologue. The disavowal of ideology might in itself be the video’s most ideological ploy.

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April Is the Cruelest Month

Spring is rumored to be in the air, but in the legal academy and in general it isn’t always the happiest and most optimistic of times.  T. S. Eliot offered the following lines in the The Waste Land:

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

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Influential Articles: Llewellyn’s Law-in-Action

In response to the Blog editor’s call for discussions of law review articles that have influenced our work as academics, I offer a few words on Karl Llewellyn’s “A Realistic Jurisprudence – The Next Step,” 30 Columbia Law Review 431 (1930).  Llewellyn’s words are often cited as the first important salvo of the legal realist movement, and the article has influenced my own teaching and writing in virtually every subject area I’ve tackled.

Llewellyn begins by asserting that “law” is one of our “loosest of suggestive symbols.”  “Law” ranges in his mind from such simple forms as statutes and appellate holdings to a range of socio-cultural control devices and institutions.  “I have no desire to exclude anything from matters legal,” Llewellyn says.  “I am not going to attempt a definition of “law.  Not anybody’s definition; much less my own.”

However, Llewellyn then goes on in the bulk of the article to emphasize a particular “focus” or “point of reference.” 

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