Julie Cohen's "Configuring the Networked Self" and the Poverty of "Legal Scholarship"

"Finally and importantly, in each of these literatures, the analytical constructs generated by liberal individualism are particularly seductive because the problems they address play out in the realm of "information". Information appears to be the ultimate disembodied good, yielding itself seamlessly to abstract, rational analysis. The networked information society appears to be the autonomous, rational, disembodied self's natural milieu, transcending the particularity of bodies, cultures and spaces with equal ease. That view is a  fallacy..Liberal individualism's commitments to immateriality and disembodiment make for a very poor model of self formation, online as well as offline."

There is the subject - law, medicine, architecture, poetry, etc. - and there is the "scholarship" of the subject. In theory (dare I use that word) there should not be a great distance between the two. In practice these days, the two never meet. The above quote is from a  dense book by legal scholar Julie Cohen, an expert in copyright and privacy law. You'd never know by reading this book that Ms. Cohen is a legal scholar, since the book cites perhaps half a dozen cases and statutes, tops. When I was a kid, law scholarship collected all the cases and materials on an area and tried to develop overarching theories about what the cases and their trends meant.  Nowadays, legal scholarship is top-down: begin with a theory borrowed from social science or philosophy, and apply it to the environment in which law operates. What do you get? "Law" books that are utterly useless to practitioners, law review articles in which professors speak only at each other and are only read by each other, and a culture of "scholarship" that has removed law students from an appropriate technical and practical  framework and placed them in a social science mediated Wonderland in which their studies have no relevance to actual practice. I have loved philosophy longer than I loved law, and appreciate that once in a blue moon a social science scholar may have something interesting to say that may actually change the way I see something or do something.  The problem is with prose (and analysis) such as that of Ms. Cohen above - it seems more apt to a seminar on Heidegger than to a courtroom or legislative chamber. When law professors so remove themselves from the actual law-creating milieu, when they fall for the "siren song" (such as it is) of sociological analysis, you end up with verbose blather that enlightens no one, least of all law students "studying" this material.