Legal Intellectual Movements in Political Time: Reconstructive Leadership and Transformations of Legal Thought and Discourse
September 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1-59332-800-9 / Hardcover
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5 / vi, 188 pages
Zschirnt looks at the dynamics of change in the legal marketplace of ideas during three periods of political realignment (the 1980s, the 1930s, and the 1890s). Het analyzes patterns in legal scholarship in law reviews, trends in legal education and pedagogy, and major developments in legal thought and jurisprudence in order to assess how the embrace of revolutionary legal ideologies by presidents and other prominent political actors helped legitimate these ideologies during each period. His analysis indicates that the relationship between political support for new approaches to the law and changes in the legal marketplace of ideas has not been constant over time but rather has been contingent upon a number of contextual factors.