Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Politics of Judging

Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging by Brian Z. Tamanaha


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Not for the nonlawyers, because if you haven't gotten at least a three year law school dose of legal history with the traditional story about the realists and their politics of law taking over from the stodgy old formalists, it won't mean a damned thing.

If you have been to law school, the first half of this book is a fantastic revisionist counterfactual, calling into question everything we're taught about Holmes and Cardozo and Pound and that entire lot. Tamanaha leans on the primary sources to explain how the idea of formalism was actually invented by radical realists, and that in fact judges as far back as the 1850's candidly discuss the role of politics and indeterminacy in judging. That part is fascinating and illuminating. I was less thrilled with the second half, which discusses at length how the quantitative study of judging has imported this false intellectual dichotomy to its detriment, and its biased studies are misinterpreted in the service of disproving formalism, which doesn't really exist, anyway. Fine, but the use of the tools of historical analysis to try to take down social science methodology was just wrong. You don't get to complain about bias inherited from a historical narrative, and then suggest the answer is to supply a second narrative. That entirely misses the point, which is that social science methodology needs to be critiqued with statistics and actual analysis. Sigh.

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Deadhouse Gates

Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Epic fantasy. Eeepic. I knew I wasn't doing this book any favors when I cued up the audio to go with my 200 sit-ups workouts, and indeed I did find myself halfway through being all, inhale, up, hold, exhale, down, inha—hey, who's this guy again? What side is he on? . . . Whose army of the apocalypse?.

But it was a positive in the end, because it turns out the only thing this series really has going for it is plot. It's a positive, just stay with me. Because when you can come off a distracted reading like that, and the last hundred pages still knock your socks off with the assassination and politics and gods and slaughtered POW's and, you know, stuff, it's doing the plot right.

I do have to stop a moment to make fun of everything else, though. Like how every soldier is also a philosopher:

The captain sighed after a moment, hastily completing the task. "Do you find the need to answer all this, Historian?" he asked. "All those tomes you've read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we've seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?"

A soldier-philosopher barely staying afloat in freshman composition, I should say. The number of times I snortgiggled, I can't even tell you.

But the point. The point is I liked it anyway, you see, because it has gobs of plot, and sometimes that's all she really ordered, you know?

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