The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt

him an amateur. In Schlegel's hands Moore becomes an apt symbol of the problem of the interdisciplinary law professor—trapped between two conflicting senses of professional identity and welcome in neither. Schlegel shows how Moore gradually discovered that his quest for mathematical precision and empirical certainty in studies of banking practices and parking studies involved situations too complicated to be comprehended by his methods. He does not discuss why Moore did not turn to the obvious alternative—the more anthropological "soft empiricism" that has been used with some success by present-day scholars, and which would have been more compatible with Moore's insights about law's dependence on custom. From Schlegel's description, however, one assumes that Moore was too caught up in a particular vision of empirical social science to credit such a methodology. Schlegel's third and final theme is a claim about how one should write intellectual history—as a history of intellectuals and the accidents and contingencies that led them to take their peculiar intellectual paths. To this end, he discusses the methodological, research, administrative, and funding problems met by the central characters of his story in almost compulsive detail, hoping to show us that the history of Legal Realism is comprehended and explained by these contingencies. Yet this third theme is in some tension with the first two. By the end of the book, Schlegel has returned to overarching claims about the primacy and ideological force of law professors' professional identity, which Cook and Moore internalized while teaching in midwestern law schools before coming to Columbia and Yale. This broader professional and ideological explanation for the failures of Realism does not seem to depend on the contingencies that Schlegel stresses in the middle parts of the book, and even seems to resemble the sort of intellectual historicizing Schlegel warns us against.