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INTRODUCTION:
LAW’S AUTONOMY
Stu Woolman & Michael Bishop
1 Law’s autonomy
One of the wonderful things about law is its enormous variation in
rhetorical forms. You can be a formalist. Well, actually, only other
people can be formalists (since it has, sadly, come to be used solely
as a term of derision.) But that still leaves open the possibility of
being a critical legal scholar (who can drive a Rolls Royce at Harvard
but still advance the needs of the proletariat), a realist (who drives
fast, and yet always manages to be late for therapy), a pragmatist
(who makes the best of a lousy car), an original intentist (who was
born in 1994 and drives a new model BMW), a Brit crit (who drives a
really lousy car and truly believes she is part of the vanguard of the
proletariat), a positivist (who knows that there is a clear difference
between a good car and a lousy car, but can’t remember whether her
car is parked closer to the core or the penumbra), a feminist (who
doesn’t think there’s anything ‘funny’ about her car), a poststructuralist
(who drives two cars in binary opposition to one
another), a critical race theorist (who drives a really lousy car
because its ‘black’ and ‘you really wouldn’t understand’), a critical
latino theorist (who waited 3 months for the factory to deliver
something in beige), a natural law theorist (who believes God created
his car), a minimalist (who drives a lousy car and understands that the
car speaks for itself), a lit crit (who can tell a thousand illuminating
stories about her car), an ubuntuist (who drives a new BMW because
it ‘is because we are’), an experimentalist (who drives a lousy car but
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