The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism

Laura Kalman, author of two prior works on legal theoretical history, has produced perhaps her finest work to date in The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism. The book traces the path of a school of thought known as legal liberalism, beginning with its roots in the realist movement that arose in the 1920s and continuing through the movement's height in the 1960s when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a series of rulings based on legal liberalism that precipitated wide-scale social reform. Yet the book is about more than the path of this legal theory; it moves into a higher debate of law's place alongside politics and history. It also takes a hard look at the discipline known as law, a discipline that by its nature should be as clear as black and white, but that increasingly is not.