As I mentioned a couple of months ago, the magazine Legal Affairs is conducting an online poll of the top 20 Legal Thinkers in America. Of course, they recognize the poll is unscientific, but it's a fun exercise nonetheless.
The authors of the poll have offered up a list of 125 names, and allow you to choose 5 from the list, with one additional write-in.
While there is a lengthy list of omissions from the names they have offered, the one I find most apparent is Madhavi Sunder, a young scholar whose work explores law's construction of religion and culture through inquiries into intellectual property law and international law.
Her two masterpieces, "Cultural Dissent" (Stanford Law Review 2001) and "Piercing the Veil" (Yale Law Journal 2003), together tell the story of ground up struggles to remake culture and religion against the backdrop of outmoded legal understandings. She offers nothing less than a New Enlightenment, extending and remedying the Old.
She is currently editing a book on gender and law (Ashgate forthcoming 2005) and writing a magnum opus on intellectual property theory.
I may be biased, but I think it'll be hard to find another legal thinker writing in America today whose work speaks as profoundly to the most difficult issues of our day.
So if you have a moment, click here and write in "Madhavi Sunder" (please check spelling, as computers may count "Mahdavi Sunder (misspelled)" and "Madhavi Sunder" as different persons). The poll closes at the end of the month.