The Mind in the Major American Law School

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal thought, which began in the late 1960s and continues with unabated force to this day, that has transformed the character of modem thinking about law. Virtually every field of human knowledge is being mined for what it can contribute to our understanding of the processes of law and of legal issues.