BACK WHEN I WAS IN LAW SCHOOL, my classmate Jacob Corre and I once talked about all the various strands of legal scholarship — legal realism, legal process, law and society, law and literature, critical legal studies, etc. — and concluded that the Next Big Thing would be a school of thought called “legal legalism,” in which the question to be addressed would be “what’s the law on that, anyway?”

Back then — when Roberto Unger was calling on God to speak, but instead we got Duncan Kennedy — this seemed remote enough to be funny. But I think it’s not too far from what Larry Solum is getting at in his posts on neoformalism.