10 - The Common Law Tradition

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Of all Llewellyn's works The Common Law Tradition is the most fascinating and the most frustrating. It stands to Bramble Bush as a wise but eccentric elder statesmen to a brilliant young demagogue. As he reads and re-reads the pages the critic is beset by conflicting impressions: clear thinking and confused metaphor; candour and white-wash; erratically balanced; clear-eyed realism and tradition-struck romanticism; a thesis of classic simplicity elaborated in a Gothic structure; an impassioned plea for reason and common-sense; ideas worked over and polished for more than thirty years presented as a rude elementary analysis. The principal addressee is the ordinary practitioner, yet the Teutonic thoroughness of the documentation wearies all but the most patient scholar; empirical methods, idiosyncratically ‘scientific’, are used to verify hypotheses expressed in terms which look suspiciously metaphysical; a work of theory on the grand scale is advertised as a do-it-yourself manual for judges and advocates; the author preaches at greatest length where he has practised least–only ten pages specifically for the scholar, nearly one hundred and fifty for the judge. Richly specific in illustration, insipidly vague in general conclusion. A success and a disappointment.

Such paradoxes, those which are genuine and those which are only apparent, complicate the task of analysis and evaluation. They suggest ambivalence on the part of the author not only in respect of his conclusions, but also in respect of his aims, especially as to readership.