NewYorkUniversity
LawReview
Issue

Volume 72, Number 4

October 1997

The Turn to History

Barry Friedman

Laura Kalman’s The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism is a rollicking romp through a half-century of law and legal scholarship. Suggesting that law professors read the book is something akin to asking playwrights to read their latest reviews. Kalman, a law-trained historian, tells us there was a time when she read law review articles to ease her to sleep, a strategy that failed her once the articles had “become too interesting.” Kalman’s subjects, legal scholars, are likely to find her book equally engrossing, and for reasons that reach far beyond membership in a mutual admiration society.