Desautels-Stein Publishes Two Books with Cambridge University Press

Associate Professor Justin Desautels-Stein recently published two books that draw on his background and expertise in critical legal studies and contemporary legal thought. The first, a monograph titled The Jurisprudence of Style: A Structuralist History of American Pragmatism and Liberal Legal Thought (2018), is the product of research going back to Desautels-Stein’s studies in graduate school, offering a fully developed account of how to understand critical legal studies today. The target of that redevelopment is what Desautels-Stein calls the legal structure of American Pragmatism.

Along with UC Berkeley historian Christopher Tomlins, Desautels-Stein also published the edited volume Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (2017). Drawing from conferences held at Colorado Law and Harvard Law School, the collection brings together nearly 30 scholars from around the world in an effort to answer the question of whether “contemporary legal thought” is a meaningful category of analysis. With parallels in the historiography of whether and when “contemporary art” exists, Desautels-Stein and Tomlins elicited responses from scholars including Duncan Kennedy, Marianne Constable, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, and Colorado Law’s Pierre Schlag.