This Article is an attempt to evaluate the enterprise of legal scholarship. It might appear that an enormous amount has been written about the subject in recent years, but the majority of the discussions actually focus on the law itself, on legal theory, or on the validity of new approaches, such as law and economics, law and literature, and critical legal studies. The concern here is the remainder-that great mass of work that discusses contemporary legal issues in a manner that is difficult to describe but easy to recognize. 1 It can be referred to, without any implicit condemnation, as standard legal scholarship. These are not cheerful times for standard legal scholarship. In fact, the field is widely perceived as being in a state of disarray. It seems to lack a unified purpose, a coherent methodology, a sense of forward motion, and a secure link to its past traditions. It is bedeviled by a gnawing sense that it should adopt the methods of other disciplines but it is uncertain how the process is to be accomplished. The field even lacks a conceptual framework within which to criticize itself. One reasonable way to develop such a framework is to rely upon the same approach that has been used to reevaluate other forms of scholarship. In fact, the reevaluation of scholarship has been a central theme in twentieth-century thought. Its most consistent development is to be found in continental philosophy: the phenomenology of Husserl, 2 Schutz, 3 and Merleau-Ponty, 4 the linguistic analysis of the