Title:  Legal Reasoning: Collected Essays Author:  Duncan Kennedy Series:  Contemporary European Cultural Studies Imprint:  The Davies Group, Publishers soft cover 222 pp. USD 24.00 ISBN 978-1934542026 February  2008 Legal Reasoning: Collected Essays includes four essays written over a twenty-year span. They present a comprehensive and original account of legal reasoning as done by judges, lawyers, and legal academics. In a work that is likely to become the definitive introduction to critical legal theory by a leading theorist of the critical legal studies movement, the author has been the first to put together in a systematic way the insights of American legal realism with Continental phenomenology and semiotics. His version of legal reasoning presents it as "work in a medium" deploying a set of "argument-bites" analogous to the words of a language. The result is simultaneous freedom and constraint. Kennedy then turns his approach to a critique of current European legal theory, with an essay on Hart and Kelsen and another on the approach of the European jurists pre-occupied with "coherence" and with the "European social model" in the current process of harmonization of European law. Contents Introduction Freedom and Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenomenology A Semiotics of Legal Argument A Left/Phenomenological Alternative to the Hart/Kelsen Theory of Legal Interpretation Thoughts on Coherence, social Values and National Tradition in Private Law Index Author Duncan Kennedy is the Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School. His previously published books include The Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy, A Critique of Adjudication [fin de siecle], and Sexy Dressing, Etc. He is the author of numerous articles in American and European law reviews. Kennedy was one of the founding members of the critical legal studies movement, and was active in its efforts to transform law and legal education over the period from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. He is at present the best known advocate of critical legal studies in legal academia.