ADVOCACY AND SCHOLARSHIP

The apex of American legal thought is embodied in two types of writing s: the federal appellate opinion and the law review article. In this A rticle, the author criticizes the whole enterprise of doctrinal consti tutional law scholarship, using a recent U.S. Supreme Court case and a Harvard Law Review article as quintessential examples of the dominant genre. In a rhetorical tour deforce, the author argues that most of m odern constitutional scholarship is really advocacy in the guise of sc holarship. Such an approach to legal scholarship may have some merit a s a strategic move towards a political end; however, it has little val ue as scholarship, the goal of which is to seek truth. As a formerly m onolithic legal system becomes more culturally heterogeneous, judges a nd academics no longer share as many assumptions about social truth. H ence, they have an increasing need to mask political judgments in orde r to avoid the contentious political battles that this increased diver sity produces. Legal academia's present obsession with defending const itutional law as something more than an ad hoc rationalization of what are essentially political choices suggests that the present genre of constitutional scholarship may well have outlived its usefulness as a discursive form.