About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


66 Tex. L. Rev. 1071 (1987-1988)
Climbing the Most Dangerous Branch: Legisprudence and the New Legal Process

handle is hein.journals/tlr66 and id is 1103 raw text is: Book Review Climbing the Most Dangerous Branch: Legisprudence and the New Legal Process CASES AND MATERIALS ON LEGISLATION: STATUTES AND THE CREA- TION OF PUBLIC POLICY. By William N. Eskridge, Jr.t and Philip P. Frickey.T St. Paul, Minnesota: West Publishing Co., 1988. Pp. xlvii, 937. $35.95.tt Reviewed by A. Michael Froomkin* Legislatures, and the statutes they produce, are the poor cousins of legal education. Statutory construction, not to mention statutory draft- ing, are to be learned by osmosis, if at all. These subjects rarely have their own places in the curriculum, and when they do, they are vastly outnumbered by common-law courses. Nowhere is this more evident than in the traditional first-year curriculum. This absence creates the presumption that judges and courts are what law is all about. Even in later semesters, the subject of article I of the Constitution remains the least- and worst-studied branch of government, despite its potential for being the most dangerous branch.' Jerome Frank traced the legal academy's fixation on courts and common law to the ravings of one brilliant neurotic-Langdell.2 Whatever its source, the fixation is reinforced by the relative contempt in which the academy seems to hold the political marketplace of the legisla- ture. From a pedagogic standpoint, the study of legislation loses out be- cause the subject is difficult and the issues subtle and recursive. t Visiting Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. T Associate Professor of Law, University of Minnesota Law School. if Hereinafter cited by page number only. * B.A. 1982, Yale University; M. Phil. 1984, Cambridge University; J.D. 1987, Yale Law School. Law Clerk to Chief Judge John F. Grady, Northern District of Illinois, 1987-1988; Law Clerk to Judge Stephen Williams, D.C. Circuit, 1988-1989. I would like to thank Jerry Mashaw for his comments on an earlier draft of this Review. 1. lit is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defence. In republi- can government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. THE FEDERALIST No. 51, at 356 (J. Madison) (B. Wright ed. 1961). 2. Frank, A Plea for Lawyer-Schools, 56 YALE L.J. 1303, 1303 (1947). 1071