Legal Profession Blog

3,000,000 Page Views

Over the weekend this blog registered Three Million hits! That is some milestone, especially as blogs come and go -- or, more often, become a post-every-once-in-a-while thing. This one is decidedly not that, thanks to Michael Frisch, whose research ability and prolificality are astonishing to me. He is the Stephen King of blawging. Mike is obviously responsible for the lion's share, by far, of the 3,000,000. I know I speak for founding editor Jeff Lipshaw and contributing editor Nancy Rapoport when I say: Congrats, Mike! (Alan Childress)

Kadish & Kadish on Honoring Law By Breaking It: Bringing Back Discretion to Disobey

Posted by Alan Childress

That may be a bit of an exaggeration about the Kadish argument, since they say "rule departures" rather than "violations" or "breaking the law," but it is an intriguing argument nonetheless.  Admittedly not so much a legal ethics argument as an ethics one [on the concept of law and the philosophy of law-deviations and civil disobedience], but I felt it appropriate to blog on it here because it is part of a larger project I am working on--more on that soon--that certainly does include works on legal ethics and the legal profession.

Mortimer and Sanford Kadish first published their classic study of rule departures within law in 1973, by Stanford U. Press, and I am republishing it as a digital book with permission (and I made new covers, left). Here is the Amazon site featuring it and allowing its download. It is in the form of a Kindle book but is also fully compatible with free ereader apps on PC and laptops, Mac, iPhone, BlackBerry, and iPad. (Weirdly, Kindle books read better on the iPad than iBooks do, since their own iBooks makes you strip the linking of footnotes and other necessities of law books.)  It's my first follow-up after bringing back Warren & Brandeis, The Right to Privacy (both digital ebook, and in paper, right) last month, with blogging here.  Discretion to Disobey is  part of a series I want to do, Classics of Law & Society, so feel free to write me if you want to digitize your own classic work and believe you hold at least its digital rights (this means you, Nell Harper Lee, though Ronald Dworkin should still ask too, or for that matter anyone with a timeless book--so in fact I am working on some legal history and judicial biography works, and others that should be available for downloads.)  

The Kadish book is certainly a recognized classic:  people were arguing about it from when it first came out.  One reviewer wrote that "the paradoxical idea that a citizen or official may lawfully break the law" surely "will raise the hackles" of a positivist.  (I'd also gladly publish Hart's rejoinder, The Concept of Law 2:  Positive Vibes.)  Both citizens and government actors, the book argues, have the power and the right to deviate from law in certain contexts and yet not act illegally in a sense, because law itself contains strands of adaptations to its own departures that the authors weave into a sustained jurisprudential whole. Mortimer Kadish (1916-2010) was a much-published philosophy professor at Case Western, while his brother Sanford became dean at Berkeley's law school and remains an accomplished professor and scholar there.  This book is truly a joint product of the fields of philosophy and law.  I hope it's of interest to some of our readers (I bet Patrick S. O'Donnell has read it, and may have even assigned it to his classes).  If you have a similar classic that needs to be easily read again, or a new manuscript (including Patrick), let me know....

UPDATE:  Kadish and Kadish is now available in 8 other formats, including PDF and ePub, at Smashwords.  It is featured with reviews and its history, at quidprobooks.com, with other new ebooks.