Hermann Kantorowicz

You are probably thinking, "Hermann who?"  So was I, until Russell Miller introduced me to this scholar, who was both a forefather and a critic of American legal realism.  As was explored in a day-long roundtable yesterday (which included such luminaries as Professors James Q. Whitman and Vivian Curran), Kantorowicz was a prime instigator of the "free law" movement in Germany, which was consulted by America's legal realists.  In looking back to the debates of the early 1900s between formalism and free law, it is striking how a century later we are still having the same debates over what the role of a judge is in a judicial system, and, indeed, in a political system.  For anyone interested in legal history and jurisprudence, have a look at this article recently published by the German Law Journal.

It would be interesting to see any comments highlighting forgotten scholars (U.S. or otherwise) who, like Kantorowicz, should be revisited.