The most vivid account of law's isolation from the social-political world remains Judith Shklar's, Legalism 9 (1964):

The urge to draw a clear line between law and non-law has led to the constructing of ever more refined and rigid systems of formal definitions. This procedure has served to isolate law completely from the social context within which it exists. Law is endowed with its own discrete, integral history, its own "science," and its own values, which are all treated as a single "block" sealed off from general social history, from general social theory, from politics, and from morality. The habits of mind appropriate, within narrow limits, to the procedures of law courts in the most stable legal systems have been expanded to provide legal theory and ideology with an entire system of thought and values. [Id. at 2-3]

The tendency to think of law as "there" as a discrete entity, discernibly different from morals and politics, has its deepest roots in the legal profession's views of its own functions, and forms the very basis of most of our judicial institutions and procedures. That lawyers have particularly pronounced intellectual habits peculiar to them has often been noticed, especially by historians and other students of society whose views differ sharply from those of the legal profession. [Id. at ___]

Legalism can be seen as "a way of thinking about social life, a mode of consciousness" which structures our social experience. [Roberto Unger, Knowledge and Politics 75 (1975)]. "Legalism is, above all, the operative outlook of the legal profession, both bench and bar." [Shklar, at 8][For an account of how legalism effects the lawyers' relations with clients, see Richard Wasserstrom, Lawyers as Professionals: Some Moral Considerations, 5 Human Rights 1 (1975)]

An ideological world-view premised on legalism "is as much an obscuring veil as a clarifying lens for approaching social problems. Law and legal thinking are as frequently the cause of social trouble as the means of resolving it." [Peter D'Errico, The Law is Terror Put Into Words, 2 Learning and the Law 39, 40 (Fall, 1975)]. Legalism has increasingly come under criticism for "its role in maintaining oppressive social conditions and for the exceeding narrowness . . . as a world view." [Id.] Richard Wasserstrom has noted that

the law is conservative in the same way in which language is conservative. It seeks to assimilate everything that happens to that which has happened. It seeks to relate any new phenomenon to what has already been categorized and dealt with. Thus, the lawyers' virtually instinctive intellectual response when he is confronted with a situation is to look for the respects in which that situation is like something that is familiar and that has a place within the realm of understood legal doctrine.

* * * *

I think that persons who are genuinely concerned with far-reaching and radical-the generic sense of the term-solutions to social ills ought to be on guard against and ought to mistrust this powerful tendency on the part of the lawyer to transmogrify what is new into what has gone before or to reject as unworkable or unintelligible what cannot be so modified. . . . [Richard Wasserstrom, Postscript: Lawyers and Revolution, 30 U. Pitts. L. Rev. 125, 129 (1968)]

Law teachers take pride in teaching students to "think like a lawyer." They may, without realizing it, be teaching not only a practical form of problem-solving, but a legalistic world-view.

It was the proudest boast of law schools to train students to think like lawyers. This process entailed a highly stylized mode of intellectual activity that rewarded inductive reasoning, analytical precision, and verbal felicity. But relentless doctrinal analysis of appellate opinions severely restricted the range and depth of inquiry. Craft was rewarded over choice and process over purpose. Thinking like a lawyer required the application of technical skills to the task of problem-resolution within the confines of the adversary system. Justice, it was assumed, emerged inevitably from the confrontation of skilled advocates in an adversary setting. Legalism instilled ‘laissez-faire morality' in its converts: the presumption that proper decisions were the decisions that the legal system produced." [Auerbach, at 276]

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