Lawrence Friedman on the Aridity of Constitutional Law Scholarship

I'm proud to say that Lawrence Friedman, America's foremost legal historian, was my mentor during (and after) my  graduate legal studies at Stanford Law School. He remains among the most professionally impressive and personally influential scholars I have ever known, never wavering from his commitment to avoid writing anything dry and uninteresting.

Lawrence's most recent publication, "Law and Economics in Society," published in the Hofstra Law Review (Vol. 39, page 487), and presumably based on a lecture he gave there, is, as usual, full of wit and wisdom. In it, he criticizes some (but not all) practitioners of Law and Economics for ignoring both the limitations of economics and the advantages of  other social-scientific approaches to understanding the operation of  law in society. My favorite part of his new paper, however, is towards the end, where he laments that neither Law and Economics nor any of the other social scientific approaches to law have appreciably influenced certain "citadels" of legal scholarship, most notably constitutional law:

Most legal scholarship is sadly lacking in rigor and objectivity. Every year, law reviews publish thousands of pages of old-fashioned legal writing - blind to the realities of society, incurably solipsistic, and inbred. To be frank, constitutional law is a particularly arid field. It seems incurably devoid of interest in empirical data. Its very success, its very relevance to public issues, breeds scholarship that is either pure ideology and punditry, or the elaborate exposition of doctrines that make little or no difference to outcomes, to life in society, or reality. Most writing in the field is bloated, dismal, and biased. Many of the scholars seem eager only to spin out their own pet theories which rest on their own particular prejudices, and pass these off as some sort of eternal truth. As a legal historian, I find the pseudo-history of some constitutional lawyers, the habit of passing off their normative arguments as history, particularly irksome.... As an amateur legal sociologist, it bothers me that legal scholars seem so uninterested in whether doctrines and decisions make any difference in the real world. Maybe they assume that anything the Supreme Court says has some magic effect in society. Almost all of the "impact studies" come from political scientists. Nobody else seems to see any use for actual data. (495). 

I agree entirely with Lawrence's argument, but even if you don't, you must admit it's not dull!