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This chapter explores the role, and the reticence, of the legal academic community in the civil rights revolution era. While Alexander Bickel, Herbert Wechsler, Charles Black, Harry Edwards, and Louis Pollak took part, others, like Gerald Gunther and Paul Freund urged caution on the courts and the executive branch. The legal process school raised questions about the reasoning in Brown, and some academics like Robert Bork, Derrick Bell, and Raoul Berger, for disparate reasons, found Brown v. Board wanting. But for legal academics, Brown has become a touchstone. Efforts to "get right" with it still power academic conversations about the role of the courts in society and politics.

The Introduction discusses the origins, ambition, approach, and structure of the Model Penal Code, connecting the Code’s structure to that of the book. Topics addressed include the origin of the Model Penal Code as a project by the American Law Institute to fundamentally rethink and revise American criminal law. The Model Penal Code’s treatmentist approach is discussed and illustrated. Readers are introduced to the two-part structure of the Code, a Model Penal Code and a Model Correctional Code. The Model Penal Code is introduced as the key to American criminal law, with particular attention to its central definition of crime in section 1.02. Finally, the Model Penal Code’s three-part scheme for the analysis of criminal liability is laid out.

An ironic legacy of legal realism, rather than a reformed induction, was a turn to “general principles.” Legal principles might be viewed in two contrary ways: either as free-standing, unrevisable, and opposing one another; or, as open-ended, tentative, and suggesting alternative options for the matter at hand. The two views might be described as thinking and judging from principle or, as Alexander Bickel put it, toward principle. In the first view, they are fixed and incommensurable, while in the second they are, in Edward Levi’s words, part of a “moving classification system.” Oppositions of principle are intimately connected with unresolved social conflict, revealing the necessity of adaptation of practice in the resolution of disputes over principle. In the first view, the conceptual space of principle is fixed at the moment of decision, principles seem authoritative in their most general formulation, and their adoption may be influenced by subjective preferences rather than concrete experience (the “abuse of principle”). According to the second view, the matter at hand may be an “early case” and not warrant a principled decision. The theory of Ronald Dworkin is associated with the former view, in opposition to the deferential and participatory conception of Bickel and Holmes.