Review Essay:
Peter Margulies, Progressive Lawyering and Lost Traditions (1995) (reviewing Milner S. Ball’s The Word and the Law (1993) and Anthony Kronman’s The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideas of the Legal Profession (1993)), 73 TEXAS L. REV. 5.
 

Abstract:
Margulies posits three distinct views of legal traditionalism that fully embrace tradition in its broadest sense. First, the prudential view, put forward by Kronman, sees commitment to tradition as an affirmance of culture and practical wisdom over the totalizing demands of modernity. The redemptive view, put forward by Milner Ball, invokes biblical and progressive traditions to redeem the status quo from inequity and prepare the ground for the divine revelation of justice. The civic humanist view acknowledges that one can invoke Providence, as the redemptive approach does, while seeking a synthesis of the political and the theological centered on human community. This Essay considers the interaction of the Civil Rights movement with the prudential, redemptive, and civic humanistic views of tradition in light of three elements: narrative, normativity, and irony. Margulies concludes that the civic humanists come closest to matching the account of tradition revealed in the Civil Rights movement.