In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche presents a history of metaphysics that can also be read as a history of jurisprudence. Nietzsche shows how—via Platonism, Christendom, Kantianism, and utilitarianism—the “real” or “true” world of ideals gives way to an “apparent” phenomenal world that is itself ultimately brought into question. This article shows how 20th-century legal thought, broadly construed, also moves away from “ideals” of law toward an understanding of law as observable social phenomena. It suggests that the move to the “apparent” world in legal thought raises questions similar to those raised by Nietzsche's work: Does sociological law point to a nihilistic destruction of the legal tradition or to a joyous possibility of overcoming that tradition?

Marianne Constable's Nietzschean foray into American legal writing is a contribution simultaneously to both theory and history. The latter deserves special mention, for despite the very important legal theory currently being played in a Nietzschean key, legal history has largely remained immune, caught in a range of liberal and critical approaches. Constable in this essay takes a familiar body of thought and interrogates it with a stunningly new set of questions. What looks like the checkered career of “democratic culture” to a writer like Morton Horwitz becomes the descent into the lowest stages of hell for Constable, a journey to the deepest recesses of nihilism.

Ever since the formation of an academic bar, one which left the “practical world” of apprentices and clerkships barely 100 years ago, the architects of law's intellectual life have looked outside the canons of lawyers' law to academic life and its deep thinkers for stimulation. From the German social scientists of Pound's time to Foucault in our own, the erotica of the legal academy have often been drawn from French and German philosophers and social theorists. There may be, in fact, a pattern to this inclination in America to draw insights from the “wild passion” of the French or the “dark terror” of the Germans. There is certainly an ongoing effort to avoid England in both its commonness and its construction of the “savage” or the ethnographically primitive “other” on which English law based its authority for so long. American sociolegal intellectuals, as part of the legal academy, crave a hit of the “other” on the continent of Europe, having denuded the American forests of its native occupants.

Marianne Constable's essay, “Genealogy and Jurisprudence,” brings the intellectual history of the law and society field within the framework of Nietzsche's six-stage history of metaphysics. Reorganized within that framework, the work of particular law and society scholars is seen to represent stages of thought about the relationship between the world of appearances described in empirical research and the possibilities for human action. Successive movements among law and society scholars pass, like Nietzsche's history of metaphysics, through stages of “error” (positivism, empiricism, critical legal studies, interpretive studies, constitutive theory), moving closer to complete acceptance of the view that action need not follow either legal rules or empirically described patterns and, thus, can be free.

Every age must find its own particular meaning for the biblical admonition, “With much wisdom comes much sorrow.” Every age must come to terms, in its own way, with the fact that the quest for knowledge is not an unproblematic social good, that the world is neither ours to be known nor, through knowledge, mastered. How our age learns these lessons, and whether it will do so at all, is the question that animates Marianne Constable's “Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law.”.

Nietzsche is a notoriously difficult philosopher to follow. As he himself wrote, he was not interested in followers. Those who read Nietzsche and care to engage in his thought, then, cannot say that they have not been warned as to its inhospitable character.

That that character is still an issue becomes manifest in two of the four responses to “Genealogy and Jurisprudence.” The responses of Frank Munger and of Christine B. Harrington and John Brigham fail to grasp what is at stake in the claim that Nietzsche can help us to think about “the complicated character of current relations between law and social science” (GJ4 at 554).

In ordinary conversation, speakers are often called on to defend their assertions. In talk that takes place in institutional settings, speakers must often account for their claims as well. This study concerns the methods of argumentative support employed by participants in a particular institutional setting: jury deliberations. Micro-interactional analysis of transcripts of two actual deliberations—using the theore tical and methodological perspectives of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis-reveals that when jurors present defenses or accounts of their positions, they often reference mundane experience and practical reasoning. Jurors do not, then, merely weigh strictly “legal” considerations. Three of the jurors' discursive methods are scrutinized: Normative assertions, claims of expertise, and declarations of knowledge. These techniques serve not only to establish “evidence” in support of a juror's position but also to deflect other jurors' disagreement