A Midrash on Rabbi Shaffer and Rabbi Trollope

Abstract

Thomas Shaffer is the most unusual, and in many ways the most interesting, contemporary writer on American legal ethics. A lawyer impatient with legalisms and hostile to rights-talk, a moral philosopher who despises moral philosophy, a Christian theologian who refers more often to the rabbis than to the Church Fathers, a former law school dean who is convinced that law schools have failed their students by teaching too much law and too little literature, a traditionalist who' wholeheartedly embraces feminism, an apologist for the conservative nineteenth-century gentleman who describes his own politics as "left of center," Shaffer is a complex thinker who, I suspect, takes more than a little pleasure in the contradictions he bestraddles. In any event, Shaffer has produced a series of books and articles on professional ethics written with profundity, gentility, and polemical passion.