Though he lives in Valhalla, his bleak and angry book reads as if it were written by an alienated central European intellectual smoking bad cigarettes in a cheap urban room and getting a lot off his chest. Reason in law is a sham. It cannot be anything but a sham, and, since in liberal culture reason is the basis of law s authority, liberal versions of law are and always will be shams. Reason can only be understood as a modest and inherently skeptical enterprise, one deeply incompatible with political rule. The rule of law is rule by the beliefs of those in power.
Reason is merely power s rhetorical cover.
It signifies nothing, at least nothing honorable. This is Thomas Reed Powell with a vengeance. Were it not for the remarkable aptness of Schlag s message to the politics of impeachment, I would recommend this book only to a narrow audience of legal theorists. Readers must know their Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Nussbaum as well as their H.L.A. Hart, Dworkin, and Sunstein to follow the argument. Inasmuch as critical reflexivity institutes its own rational frames, and inasmuch as rational frame construction has its own critically reflexive character, it is hardly clear which is which.