This lively book reassesses a century of jurisprudential thought
from a fresh perspective, and points to a malaise that currently
afflicts not only legal theory but law in general. Steven Smith
argues that our legal vocabulary and methods of reasoning
presuppose classical ontological commitments that were explicitly
articulated by thinkers from Aquinas to Coke to Blackstone, and
even by Joseph Story. But these commitments are out of sync with
the world view that prevails today in academic and professional
thinking. So our law-talk thus degenerates into "just words"--or a
kind of nonsense.
The diagnosis is similar to that offered by Holmes, the Legal
Realists, and other critics over the past century, except that
these critics assumed that the older ontological commitments were
dead, or at least on their way to extinction; so their aim was to
purge legal discourse of what they saw as an archaic and fading
metaphysics. Smith's argument starts with essentially the same
metaphysical predicament but moves in the opposite direction.
Instead of avoiding or marginalizing the "ultimate questions," he
argues that we need to face up to them and consider their
implications for law.
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