Law as a Means to an End
Threat to the Rule of Law

"The great scholar Grant Gilmore once asked in the title of a fascinating book, 'Is Contract Dead?' and went on to answer, 'yes.' Brian Tamanaha does him one better. In this book he asks, 'Is Law Dead?' His answer: 'almost.' Law, he reports, is in danger of succumbing to instrumentalism and as such losing its vitality. Much of modern legal scholarship seeks to make law a branch of applied economics. This book pushes against that movement, as well as many other related "realist" movements. Whether one agrees or disagrees with Tamanaha, he or she will be wiser after having read this fine book."
--Malcolm M. Feeley, Claire Sanders Clements Dean's Professor, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley

"Brian Tamanaha sounds a firebell in the night. He shows how the most progressive modern approaches to law, by undermining beliefs in its objectivity and formal rationality, and its rootedness in natural or customary standards of right conduct, have fatally undermined its claims to restrain power-seeking or serve the common good. Law is now seen simply as an instrument -- not as a limit on greed and power, but a means by which interests pursue their own selfish ends. And it's not only interest-groups and their lawyers, but judges and jurists, who have signed on to an instrumentalism that challenges the very ideas of the rule of law and the public interest. Tamanaha is not a nostalgic romantic. He does not think the old days can or should be recovered. He does not tell us what to do. But he illuminates our predicament with succinct history, clear-headed observation, and unflinchingly bleak analysis."
--Robert W. Gordon, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History, Yale University

"Taken as a whole, Tamanaha's book makes a significant contribution to the scholarly understanding of the rule of law in American jurisprudence....Tamanaha's book provides a superb overview of the emergence of instrumentalism as the primary perspective on law in contemporary America. The evidence he marshals to support this conclusion is impressive, leaving little doubt as to the validity of his assertions...Law as a Means to an End is an outstanding treatment of an important scholarly question with profound normative implications for American society."
--Paul M. Collins, The Law and Politics Book Review

"...In Law as a Means to an End, Tamanaha argues that the instrumental view of law, coupled with a general breakdown in our ability to reach a cencensus about which ends law should serve, poses a serious risk to the rule of law..."
--Robert T. Miller, Villanova University School of law, FIRST THINGS