Law & the Humanities

Sandy Levinson and Jack Balkin have posted their new paper, Law and the Humanities: An Uneasy Relationship.  From the abstract:

In 1930 legal professionals like Judge Learned Hand assumed that law was either part of the humanities or deeply connected to them. By the early twenty-first century, this view no longer seems accurate, despite the fact that legal scholarship has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Instead law has moved closer to the social sciences. This essay discusses why this is so, and why the humanities exist in an uneasy relationship with law and contemporary legal scholarship.

And from the paper itself:

To the extent that law school is like a school of divinity, law professors believe in the enterprise of law (including those suspensions of disbelief necessary to separate what is deemed “law” from what is deemed “politics”). Many will practice law or give legal advice to others, and all will seek to inculcate in their students the techniques of arguing to legal decisionmakers who are also internal to that enterprise. However, to the extent that law schools are “departments of law,” law professors need not practice law and may not particularly care whether one case or another is rightly decided from an internal perspective. Rather, their goal is to study law as a literary, cultural, economic, or social phenomenon. If, on occasion, they make arguments about what the law should be, reasoning will be largely from the standpoint of what would be good policy as distinct from what the law commands or requires.

Rob