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Book Review: Divergent Paths - The Academy and the Judiciary
By Leonardo M. Aldridge
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Book Review columns.
Divergent Paths - The Academy and the Judiciary
By Richard A. Posner
Harvard University Press (2016)
Judge Richard Posner’s 2016 book, Divergent Paths, can be read as a scathing indictment where the co-defendants charged include pompous law school professors totally alienated from the legal practice, federal judges who have completely delegated opinion writing, and obscure legal guidelines that confuse everyone.
Divergent Paths tries to explain how two seemingly intelligent groups of people ostensibly in the same legal profession — scholars and practitioners — talk past each other and are not fundamentally interested in what the other has to say.
The concept, of course, is not new. Courtrooms throughout the country have litigators eager to tell the first rookie attorney to cross their paths: “they don’t teach what I do in law school.” And professors in law schools, through their specialized journal writing, produce scholarship that seems to make a mockery of tried
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