Since the argument is non-linear, it makes more sense for a review to give some highlights than to outline it. Here are three highlights. While Schlag s criticisms of reason are not novel, no book that I know explores, in the legal context, logic s inevitable vicious circles, infinite regresses, and paradoxes quite as aggressively as does this one. Schlag s criticisms of passages by Cass Sunstein, Ronald Dworkin, and Suzanna Sherry are telling. There is a difference between reason and rationalization.
Rationalizations run rampant in law and in academic legal argument.
Third, the description of reason as skeptical modesty, the sort of things that a good researcher does when suggesting an hypothesis, is itself very appealing. Being reasonable means being open and reflective enough so as to believe, among alternatives, that which is most credible, and being disciplined enough to believe only that which has a higher utility for believing it than rejecting it. This modest reasonability leaves the believer in a state of perpetual changefulness incompatible with our sense of law s authority. Indeed, Schlag seems to have his red alert button pushed by any thinker who, denying his or her intellectual vulnerability, confidently declaims assertions. The basic problem with this book is that the author relies primarily on the very kinds of arguments he condemns.