A Study On Pierre Schlag’s Postmodern Legal Thought

World War II and a series economic, political and social change ensuring have thrown people into a deep doubt about rationality and knowledge. In fact, even though we haven’t step into a postmodern society completely broken up with modernity, postmodernism as a kind of attitude or sentiment has come out. The postmodern legal thought of Pierre Schlag, the law professor of Colorado Law School, is the expression of postmodernism in law science. Absorbed the postmodern philosophy of Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida, Schlag thoroughly disintegrated and subverted American modern law science.Schalg Points out that American modern law science has greatly deviated from reality. Actually, the former is almost a fabrication of scholars., It makes legal education avoid studies and expounding of the object through case method, legal discourses avoid it through games of form on one hand. On the other, it makes law science has little influence on practice. Epistemologically, Schlag considered American modern law science as an enterprise of aesthetics. Via aesthetic of grids, energy, perspectivism and dissociative, law science makes us feel, ponder and construct the law in a certain way, confront certain task and behave in certain modes. However, aesthetics are not the thing we can choose, therefore they prevent us from understanding and experiencing the law at the same time. Methodologically, Schlag indicates that American modern law science compelled us to think in its way and compressed other ways of thinking through the construction of a rational and automatic subject conspired with readers, which is constructed to make us forget and forget the forgetting. That makes us lose the ability to criticize traditional law science. Finally, Schlag led us to realize that American modern law science has become a dying discipline, and is more dead than ever before.In Schalg’s postmodern legal thought, he faced real law practice, pointed out the falsity of American legal science’s object and its weak influence on practice, and disclosed modes and process of power operation in legal science. However, like all the postmodern thoughts, Schlag’s postmodern legal thought has been eroded by political ambiguity and reflexivity, which means it inevitably relied on grand narratives, basic hypothesis and ways of thinking of modernism. Even though, Schalg makes us realize that law science’s deviation from reality is also a problem of our law science, the position of law science and legal thinkers is illusory and will endanger us seriously, and our law science’s narrative also has some kind of compression, thus we have to reflect upon the constructivity and falsity of the subject.We won’t find any alternative plan or suggestion in Schlag’s thought, but in the sense that it has told us that things aren’t like that and to some extent can be a prelude of the law and social management turn, his work is definitely meaningful.