Duellism in modern American jurisprudence

In his body of work, most recently exhibited in The Enchantment of Pea son and Laying Down the Law: Mysticism, Fetishism, and the american Legal Mind, Professor Pierre Schlag contends that law fails to signify anything real, and thus, does not exist. From this follows Schlag's pugnacious attach on t he legal practitioner as a distorted subject, the law professor and the jud ge as tools of an oppressive legal bureaucracy, and legal scholarship as a worthless pursuit. In this Review Essay, Professor David Gray Carlson attem pts to vindicate the practice of law and of legal scholarship. Using the pe rspectives of Hegel and Lacan, Carlson shows that while law may have a comp licated relation to justice, law nevertheless exists. With law so defended, Professor Carlson makes the case that we Should not and could not, as Schl ag suggests, "lay down the law.