Law and the Modern Mind first appeared in 1930 when, in the words of Judge Charles E. Clark, it "fell like a bomb on the legal world." In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the delusion that the law is a bastion of predictable and logical action. Jerome Frank's controversial thesis is that the decisions made by judge and jury are determined to an enormous extent by powerful, concealed, and highly idiosyncratic psychological prejudices that these decision-makers bring to the courtroom.

In postrevolutionary America, the autonomous individual was both the linchpin of a young nation and a threat to the founders’ vision of ordered liberty. Conceiving of self-government as a psychological as well as a political project, jurists built a republic of laws upon the Enlightenment science of the mind with the aim of producing a responsible citizenry. Susanna Blumenthal probes the assumptions and consequences of this undertaking, revealing how ideas about consciousness, agency, and accountability have shaped American jurisprudence. Focusing on everyday adjudication, Blumenthal shows that mental soundness was routinely disputed in civil as well as criminal cases. Litigants presented conflicting religious, philosophical, and medical understandings of the self, intensifying fears of a populace maddened by too much liberty. Judges struggled to reconcile common sense notions of rationality with novel scientific concepts that suggested deviant behavior might result from disease rather than conscious choice. Determining the threshold of competence was especially vexing in litigation among family members that raised profound questions about the interconnections between love and consent. This body of law coalesced into a jurisprudence of insanity, which also illuminates the position of those to whom the insane were compared, particularly children, married women, and slaves. Over time, the liberties of the eccentric expanded as jurists came to recognize the diversity of beliefs held by otherwise reasonable persons. In calling attention to the problematic relationship between consciousness and liability, Law and the Modern Mind casts new light on the meanings of freedom in the formative era of American law.

David Gray Carlson and Peter Goodrich argue that the postmodern legal mind can be characterized as having shifted the focus of legal analysis away from the modernist understanding of law as a system that is unitary and separate from other aspects of culture and society. In exploring the various "other dimensions" of law, scholars have developed alternative species of legal analysis and recognized the existence of different forms of law. Carlson and Goodrich assert that the postmodern legal mind introduced a series of "minor jurisprudences" or partial forms of legal knowledge, which both compete with and subvert the modernist conception of a unitary system of law. In doing so scholars from a variety of disciplines pursue the implications of applying the insights of their disciplines to law. Carlson and Goodrich have assembled in this volume essays from some of our leading thinkers that address what is arguably one of the most fundamental of interdisciplinary encounters, that of psychoanalysis and law. While psychoanalytic interpretations of law are by no means a novelty within common law jurisprudence, the extent and possibilities of the terrain opened up by psychoanalysis have yet to be extensively addressed. The intentional subject and "reasonable man" of law are disassembled in psychoanalysis to reveal a chaotic and irrational libidinal subject, a sexual being, a body and its drives. The focus of the present collection of essays is upon desire as an inner law, upon love as an interior idiom of legality, and represents a signficant and at times surprising development of the psychoanalytic analysis of legality. These essays should appeal to scholars in law and in psychology. The contributors are Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Peter Goodrich, Pierre Legendre, Alain Pottage, Michel Rosenfeld, Renata Salecl, Jeanne L. Schroeder, Anton Schutz, Henry Staten, and Slavoj Zizek. David Gray Carlson is Professor of Law, Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law, University of London and University of California, Los Angeles.

How do lawyers think? Brożek presents a new perspective on legal thinking as an interplay between intuition, imagination and language.

Containing the bulk of Morris Cohen's writings on the philosophy of law, this collection of essays features articles originally published in popular periodicals and law reviews during the early decades of this century. In his introduction to the Social and Moral Thought edition, Harry N. Rosenfield reviews Cohen's contributions to the philosophy of law and emphasizes Cohen's enormous influence, as a legal philosopher, on American law.

This volume consists of outstanding essays by contemporary scholars and specialists on classic writings in law and society. This second edition expands the previous volume by adding additional statements. Included are commentaries on Edward A. Ross’s Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order, Karl N. Llewellyn’s Jurisprudence: Realism in Theory and Practice, Jerome Frank’s Law and the Modern Mind, Leon Petrazycki’s Law and Morality, and Karl Renner’s The Institutions of Private Law and their Social Functions. The goal of Classic Writings in Law and Society is to acquaint a new generation of students with classic writings by diverse social and legal scholars—ranging from Henry Sumner Maine, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Hans Kelsen to Eugen Ehrlich, Nicholas S. Timasheff, and Richard Quinney. This work continues to demonstrate their contemporary theoretical relevance. Accordingly, each chapter speaks of the scholars’ work in general, how the particular book under consideration fits into that corpus, and how the book is assessed in a present day context. These essays have a clear relation to the "classic" tradition in sociolegal thought. Reading the classics is useful in gaining a better understanding and appreciation of the essential foundation for a post-classic approach in law and social inquiry—an approach that can be found in such orientations as critical legal studies, chaos theory in law, and legal semiotics. Classic Writings in Law and Society includes commentaries that consider early writings that set the standard for the social scientific approach in examining issues of law and punishment, social control, joint stock companies, business firms and nation-states in the study of law and society.