John Henry Schlegel

UB DISTINGUISHED PROFESSOR FLOYD H. AND HILDA L. HURST FACULTY SCHOLAR

JD, University of Chicago Law School BA, Northwestern University

AREAS OF INTEREST

AMERICAN LEGAL REALISM LEGAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN ECONOMY CORPORATE FINANCE ECONOMIC REDEVELOPMENT OF RUST BELT CITIES

BOOKS While Waiting for Rain: Community, Economy and Law in a Time of Change (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2022).

ARTICLES If the Music Hadn’t Stopped, or Reflections on the Great Kerfuffle: Historicism’s Continuing Grasp for Truth, 31 Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 276 (2021).

Saying Thanks with Some Self-Reflection, 69 Buffalo Law Review 201 (2021).

To Dress for Dinner: Teaching Law in a Bureaucratic Age, 66 Buffalo Law Review 435 (2018).

(716) 645-2746 schlegel@buffalo.edu

CHAPTERS Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld: On the Difficulty of Becoming a Law Professor, in Wesley Hohfeld A Century Later: Edited Work, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries (Shyam Balganesh, Ted Sichelman & Henry Smith, eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2022). Sez Who?: Critical Legal History without a Privileged Position, in The Oxford Handbook of Historical Legal Research 561 (Chris Tomlins & Markus Dubber, eds., Oxford University Press, 2018).

BOOK REVIEWS Book Review, Law & History Review 615 (2021) (reviewing Susan Bartie, Free Hands, Free Minds: Pioneering Australian Legal Scholars (Hart Publishing, 2019)). Book Review, 84 Modern Law Review 946 (2021) (reviewing Bruce A. Kimball & Daniel Coquillette, Intellectual Sword: Harvard Law School: The Second Century (Belknap Press, 2020)). I continue to work on a book about law and economy in the 1950s. What fascinates about this now long-passed time is that its understanding of what makes up a ‘good economy’ is so unlike our own, and yet, that lost understanding structures so much of the debate about the economy ever since. Such nostalgia for an unrecoverable past is pathological, but there may be a theme here. Most of my earlier work is directed toward recovering pasts that have been pathologically distorted in our presents. And I’ve begun to return to another such topic – American Legal Realism.”

A Seriously Fun Look at Law and Society

A recent issue of the Buf falo Law Review (vol. 69, 2021) devotes itself to the teaching, scholarship and unique personality of UB School of Law’s longest-serving active faculty member, John Henry Schlegel. “Serious Fun – A conference with & around Schlegel” collects nine original essays by colleagues and interlocutors of the UB Distinguished Professor, a foreword, and a closing reflection by Schlegel himself.

Schlegel joined the UB Law faculty in 1973. His scholarship has had significant influence on the way we view two critical moments in the U.S. legal academy – American Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies. Generations of UB Law students have experienced his broadly informed yet intensely personal engagement with how law works in our society and have come away challenged to look in new ways at the law and its practice.