This course examines four contemporary themes in American jurisprudence: law and economics (law as efficiency), critical legal studies (law as politics), literary theory and deconstructive method (law as a text), and humanistic legal education. Law and economics and critical legal theory imply that the classical notion of law as a public morality is dead. Excerpts from the realist and anti-realist arguments in the philosophy of science and Ronald Dworkin’s recent Law’s Empire also will be used to debate the "death of law."