In Crippled America: How to make America great again (2015), Donald J. Trump writes, “The most important lesson is this—Stand behind your word, and make sure your word stands up'” His next paragraph begins, “I don't make promises I can't keep.” Trump seems to align his word with his promises here, but he immediately follows “I don't make promises I can't keep” with “I don't make threats without following through. Don't ever make the mistake of thinking you can bully me. My business partners and employees know that my word is as good as any contract—and that better go for the other side's word as well” (138). The “word” that “stands up” and “behind” which Trump stands is a weapon of defense against bullying. It is a threat by “me” (Trump) against “you” should your word turn out not to be, like Trump's word, “as good as any contract.” Even if Trump does not explicitly invoke the slang usage of “contract” (i.e., hiring an assassin to kill someone), he “follow[s] through” on his threats against “the other side,” whose word had “better” be as good as his.

Kunal Parker's Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism shows how nineteenth‐century thinkers thought about law and history differently than do post‐Holmesian modernist sociolegal scholars, whose ahistorical law appears contingent on politics, power, or will. Understanding time and history to be essential to law, nineteenth‐century jurists conceived of a common law that was able to work with and to shape democracy, Parker argues. Contra modernist histories then, Parker claims that the common law was not a reactionary force that stood in the way of democracy and economy. His history of legal thought before modernism suggests, further, the predicament of antifoundationalist modern law and modernist scholars: stripped of time and without its own history, how can law be anything other than politics, power, or will?

In his address to the 1995 Law and Society Association, Boaventura de Sousa Santos argued that times are changing and that “we”—the law and society audience, among others—must use “the imagination to explore new modes of human possibility and styles of will and to oppose the necessity of what exists on behalf of something radically better that is worth fighting for and to which humanity is fully entitled” (Santos 1995:573). Admirable sentiments, on which Santos elaborates via three suggestive metaphors introduced to help “reinvent maps of social emancipation and subjectivities with the capacity and desire for using them” (ibid.).

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?

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).