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Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law, by Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry (Oxford, 192 pp., $25)

IN the 1930s and ’40s, advocates of “legal realism” argued that there were no objective principles constraining judges’ decisions. A few decades later, in the 1970s, theorists of “critical legal studies” used this what-the-judge-had-for-breakfast argument—they called it “indeterminacy”—to critique such classical liberal concepts as individual rights. Now, in the 1990s, a group of legal scholars whom Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry call “radical multiculturalists” is using the same indeterminacy thesis to show that the very foundations of Western rationality are evil to the core.

MM

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Mark Miller

Mark Miller is the director of environment and natural resources litigation at the Pacific Legal Foundation.

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Beyond All Reason: The Radical Assault on Truth in American Law, by Daniel A. Farber and Suzanna Sherry (Oxford, 192 pp., $25)

IN the 1930s and ’40s, advocates of “legal realism” argued that there were no objective principles constraining judges’ decisions. A few decades later, in the 1970s, theorists of “critical legal studies” used this what-the-judge-had-for-breakfast argument—they called it “indeterminacy”—to critique such classical liberal concepts as individual rights. Now, in the 1990s, a group of legal scholars whom Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry call “radical multiculturalists” is using the same indeterminacy thesis to show that the very foundations of Western rationality are evil to the core.