What's "canonical"

A propos last week's post about Yale's new pseudo-PhD in law, Katherine Franke (Columbia) writes:

You mention "canonical legal scholarship and methodologies" courses taught in many law schools - I teach one of them at Columbia.  It would be great if you could put out a call for syllabi, or links to syllabi, of such courses so we can compare notes on what counts as "canonical".

Comments are open.  Feel free to post links, or post a list of 'canonical' materials, or offer substantive suggestions.  Signed comments only:  full name, valid e-mail address.

Comments

[Lael Weinberger]

As a graduate student working in legal history, the first place I would think of going to select classic or "canonical" legal scholarship would be to some of the recent histories of American legal theory and legal academia. I'm thinking especially of William Fisher's chapter on legal theory in The Cambridge History of Law in America (2008) or of Laura Kalman's somewhat older book, The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism (Yale 1996).

[Steve Horowitz]

Perhaps too obvious, but following up on Lael's comment, Fisher (along with Kennedy) put together a book on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Canon-American-Legal-Thought/dp/0691120005

Anyone putting together such a collection will end up having to make some controversial choices, but this seems like a good place to start.

BL COMMENT: That book is worth looking at, but it's too Harvard-centric to be anything more than a starting point.

[Ethan Leib]

When I think about designing such a course (for LLMs and SJDs, admittedly), I always go back to Talha Syed's model for the SJD at Harvard:

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2006/09/canons_of_legal.html

[Katherine Franke]

Here is my syllabus from a couple years ago. Will be teaching it again this spring and I make adjustments every year, so I welcome input from others. http://www2.law.columbia.edu/faculty_franke/CLT2011/index.html