A Midrash on Rabbi Shaffer and Rabbi Trollope

Authors

David Luban, Georgetown University Law CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2002

Abstract

Thomas Shaffer is the most unusual, and in many ways the most interesting, contemporary writer on American legal ethics. A lawyer impatient with legalisms and hostile to rights-talk, a moral philosopher who despises moral philosophy, a Christian theologian who refers more often to the rabbis than to the Church Fathers, a former law school dean who is convinced that law schools have failed their students by teaching too much law and too little literature, a traditionalist who' wholeheartedly embraces feminism, an apologist for the conservative nineteenth-century gentleman who describes his own politics as "left of center," Shaffer is a complex thinker who, I suspect, takes more than a little pleasure in the contradictions he bestraddles. In any event, Shaffer has produced a series of books and articles on professional ethics written with profundity, gentility, and polemical passion.

Comments

Vol. 77 Notre Dame Law Review, Page 8889 (2002). Reprinted with permission. © Notre Dame Law Review, University of Notre Dame.

Publication Citation

77 Notre Dame L. Rev. 889-923 (2002)

Scholarly Commons Citation

Luban, David, "A Midrash on Rabbi Shaffer and Rabbi Trollope" (2002). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 526.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/526