Description: The contemporary US legal culture is marked by ubiquitous battles among various groups attempting to seize control of the law and wield it against others in pursuit of their particular agenda. This battle takes place in administrative, legislative, and judicial arenas at both the state and federal levels. This book identifies the underlying source of these battles in the spread of the instrumental view of law - the idea that law is purely a means to an end - in a context of sharp disagreement over the social good. It traces the rise of the instrumental view of law in the course of the past two centuries, then demonstrates the pervasiveness of this view of law and its implications within the contemporary legal culture, and ends by showing the various ways in which seeing law in purely instrumental terms threatens to corrode the rule of law.
Brief description: Brian Z. Tamanaha is the Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo Professor of Law at St. John's University School of Law. He delivered the inaugural Montesquieu Lecture (2004) at the University of Tilburg. He is the author of On the Rule of Law (Cambridge, 2004), Realistic Socio-Legal Theory (1997), and A General Jurisprudence of Law and Society (2001) which won the Herbert Jacob Book Prize in 2001. He has published many articles and is the Associate Editor of Law and Society Review.
Review Quotes: "Brian Tamanaha's Law as a Means to an End is something very rare--a book that has the potential to change thinking about the law in fundamental ways. The book accomplishes three substantial tasks with admirable brevity, erudition, and clarity. First, it traces the history of 'legal instrumentalism' in Nineteenth and Twentieth century jurisprudence and legal practice--a compelling story that illuminates the origins of our most basic assumptions about law. Second, it traces the pervasive influence of instrumentalist thinking in contemporary legal thought--acutely diagnosing the intellectual underpinnings of phenomena as diverse as 'cause lawyering' and the 'law and economics movement' in the legal academy. Third, it makes a compelling argument that the rise of instrumentalism has a fundamentally corrosive effect on the rule of law. This is not just an important book--it is THE important book of legal theory for this decade. Law as a Means to an End is superb."
--Lawrence Solum, John E. Cribbet Professor of Law, University of Illinois College of Law