How To Do Things With Hohfeld

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld’s 1913 article, Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning, is widely viewed as brilliant. A thrilling read, it is not. More like chewing on sawdust. The arguments are dense, the examples unfriendly, and the prose turgid. “How to Do Things With Hohfeld” is an effort to provide an accessible and sawdust-free account of Hohfeld’s article, as well as to show how and why his analysis of “legal relations” (e.g., right/duty, etc.) matters. Perhaps the principal reason is that the analysis furnishes a discriminating platform to discern the economic and political import of legal rules and legal regimes. My project here is to offer a forward-leaning interpretation of Hohfeld — to show how and why his insights remain highly relevant today. The article engages with the jural relations, decomposition and recomposition, the bundle of relations, the critique of reification, and recent discussions in property theory as well as the “New Private Law.” I am keen on protecting Hohfeld’s platform from some (legal realist) over-extensions as well as showing how the views of the “Hohfeld critics” are in many ways consonant with Hohfeld’s own thinking. The article closes with some questions about the limitations of Hohfeld’s approach

My Dinner at Langdell\u27s

This essay begins on one of those cold wet April Cambridge mornings. It was too wet for fog, but too indifferent for rain. My head ached. My lips were dry and my tongue felt bloated. The fever had surely come back. Worse - the laudanum was wearing off. Tonight would be dinner at Langdell\u27s. It occurred to me that not everyone is invited to Langdell\u27s for dinner - certainly not wayward law professors from the provinces. This was an extraordinary opportunity. Blackstone would be there. Duncan Kennedy perhaps. Certainly the early Llewellyn. I knocked on the door

The Aesthetics of American Law

Before the ethical dreams and political ambitions of law can even be articulated, let alone realized, the aesthetics of law have already shaped the medium within which those projects will have to do their work. This work attempts to retrieve and expose those recurrent forms that shape the creation, apprehension, and identity of law. What is at stake is an attempt to reveal the aesthetics within which American law is cast. The point is not simply to appreciate these aesthetics, but to understand how substantive conflicts in law are often motivated, sustained and circumscribed by the aesthetics through which they are manifested

Twilight of the American State

The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian. How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today. Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit

Contradiction and Denial

A Review of A Guide to Critical Legal Studies by Mark Kelma