This is awesome, but did you HAVE to make it such a tangled mess of close reads and quotes from many sources? 🤬
I'm trying and failing to follow the overall contours of your threadthulhu on this topic. Where do you suggest I start? I'm replying to the tweet that caught my eye.
Conversation
Or is there a reading among the many you're corralling that is particularly good? I started reading the holmes darwinism one
1
Replying to
Depends on what you are interested in...there's still not much "big picture" stuff on Holmes. Mostly obscure debates over whether or not he belongs in a certain category. That's why I do the collage-style threads to keep track.
This one was good:
openyls.law.yale.edu/bitstream/hand
1
1
Replying to
I’m intrigued by the tension between interpretive tradition and the authoritarian high modernist impulse
1
1
Replying to
Same...there's not much work that addresses it directly, or in a concrete, big picture way. That's why I make so many threads gesturing at it and trying to document the connections. You have to have some familiarity with a bunch of obscure topics to see how it all fits together.
2
1
One piece is that, to put it simplistically, the US legal and governing infrastructure was designed to replicate the Massachusetts model, to the extent possible, and to run the same "operating system." The interpretive tradition is the secularized culture of MA Puritan elites.
1
1
So it wasn't really a battle between the two. The interpretive tradition has never been organic to most of the country, and once modernization hit, the only elites who grasped it at high level were those who went to Harvard law.
2
1
But simultaneously, the high-modernism stuff swept through the country. Most states didn't really have a developed legal tradition. Especially post-Civil War, but really from the beginning, MA was providing most of the federal/constitutional law, and the official interpretations.
1
1
1
As far as I can tell, weird as it sounds, most people outside of MA either didn't notice or didn't care that most of the country didn't participate much in legal interpretation, and then Boston failed to see the looming high-modernist take-over, or anticipate what would follow.
1
1
So there just wasn't much of a debate, and the two (elite) sides never really understood or each other or what was happening, and most of the country had nothing to do with any of it. Then it fell apart, and Holmes, Brandeis (Harvard Law) and some allies "magically" repaired it.
2
1
Replying to
Thanks. I think I got that basic plot line from your thread but the lack of traction for interpretive as a serious contender was not clear before. I thought they were more evenly matched and the legibilists just won once case law overload reached a certain point

