Comment on Eder

Extract

The first difficulty in Eder is that the experience of academics working in the common law tradition renders us skeptical about the possibility that there could be something like an overall sociological theory of “the law.” What those in the Weberian tradition, including for these purposes Habermas, see as the law appears to us as quite a jumble of relatively discrete topics, such that the law of torts which looks different from the law of criminal procedure and, what is worse, the law of the sixth amendment's requirements with respect to counsel which looks different from the law of the sixth amendment's requirement with respect to confrontation of adverse witnesses. Nor does it seem to us that there are any readily available generalizations concerning long-term trends, as distinct from short-term variations attributable to differences among judges in their political preferences.