The Top Ten Reasons to be a Legal Pragmatist

Copyright 1998 Jack M. Balkin. All rights reserved.

J.M. Balkin

 
 

10. It works.
 

9. Being a legal pragmatist means never having to say you have a theory.
 

8. Buy American.
 

7. If you’re left-wing, you can finally find something to agree with Richard Posner about.
 

6. You can read all your philosophical sources in the original.
 

5. If you’re right-wing, you can finally find something to agree with Frank Michelman about.
 

4. You can avoid seeing the world in terms of rigid philosophical dichotomies (or not).
 

3. Because you’re socially constructed, it really isn’t your fault that you became one.
 

2. You can also be (a) a civic republican, (b) a feminist, (c) a deconstructionist, (d) a case-cruncher, (e) a crit, (f) a law-and-economics type, or (g) anything else.
 

1. No one has yet discovered John Dewey’s anti-semitic writings for Le Soir.