John H Schlegel
Professor, Roger and Karen Jones Faculty Scholar
B.A., Northwestern University
J.D., University of Chicago
University at Buffalo Law School
The State University of New York
620 O'Brian
Hall, North Campus
Buffalo, NY 14260-1100
Phone:(716) 645-2746
Faculty Assistant:
Deborah Nasisi, 410 O'Brian Hall, Phone: (716) 645-2459
Suzanne Caruso, 417 O'Brian Hall, Phone: (716) 645-5598
Biography:
Known to faculty and students alike by his last name, Schlegel currently teaches in the corporate/commercial area about the getting and spending of clients, a topic that is covered in both first year and upper division courses. He is part of the faculty group that offers the financial transactions concentration, teaching both acquisition transactions and in the concentration's colloquium. Such courses are only tangentially related to what he started out to do when he came to Buffalo in 1973. At that time Schlegel was hired to teach civil procedure and commercial law. In the intervening years he has tried his hand at administrative law, contracts, torts, public utility rate regulation, seminars in jurisprudence and the history of legal education, and increasingly courses and seminars that focus on the practices of lawyers. The point of all these efforts, if there is one, is to help students develop and use a concrete understanding of what lawyers and judges do day after day that is grounded in the details of those activities. While doing so, Schlegel occasionally muses about why students who claim to want a more practical education are not particularly interested in understanding what lawyers do all day, at least if doing so requires that they delve deeply into those activities and understand them as more than routine paper shuffling.
While Schlegel did teach civil procedure for about ten years and commercial law even longer, he never did any of the scholarship in jurisprudence that he planned to do when he came to Buffalo. Instead, almost immediately after arriving he began to work in legal history. For over twenty years his scholarship was focused on the history of legal education and the activities in the Twenties and Thirties of a group of scholars at Columbia, Yale and John Hopkins known as the American Legal Realists. While Schlegel continues to publish in this area, about five years ago, just after focusing his teaching activities more exclusively in the corporate/commercial area, he began a book on law and economy in the United States since World War I. This project is centered in understanding the Fifties economy and its social consequences, seen locally in Buffalo, more generally in the national economy of the time and in the run of economic change in this eighty year period.
Known for his raucous laugh, a booming but somewhat squeaky voice, a direct but often irreverent manner of address, a bit of a foul mouth and an infuriating habit of toggling between a theoretical understanding of law and the detail of its practice, Schlegel has long been puzzled by the fact that many of his students are quite afraid of him, despite the often repeated statement, "Being afraid of Schlegel is like being afraid of the Wizard of Oz." However, of late he has tried to give up worrying about this problem and instead enjoy the reaction of the hearty souls who make their way to his office when they see that it is dominated by art works and a set of geological cross-sections for the American Southwest and not with the instruments of intellectual torture.
Selected Publications:
American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995
Of Duncan, Peter and Thomas Kuhn, 22 Cardozo Law Review 1061 (2001)
Does Duncan Kennedy Wear Briefs or Boxers? Does Richard Posner Ever Sleep? Writing About Jurisprudence, High Culture and the History of Intellectuals, 45 Buffalo Law Review 277 (1997)
Alan and I: Of Critical Legal Studies, Community and All That, 44 Buffalo Law Review 636 (1996)
Talkin' Dirty, 21 Law and Social Inquiry 981 (1996)
A Tasty Tidbit, 41 Buffalo Law Review 1045 (1993)
A Certain Narcissism; A Slight Unseemliness, 63 University of Colorado Law Review 595 (1992)
The Ten Thousand Dollar Question, 41 Stanford Law Review 435 (1989)
Sex, Power and Silliness: An Essay on Ackerman's Reconstructing American Law, 6 Cardozo Law Review 847 (1985) (with Alan Freeman)
Langdell's Legacy: or The Case of the Empty Envelope, 36 Stanford Law Review 1517 (1984)
Notes Toward an Intimate, Affectionate and Opinionated History of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies, 36 Stanford Law Review 391 (1984)
