If you have time to read the whole of Llewellyn's paper, I'd encourage you to do that (it runs just under 35 pp.). But our class discussion must be more limited, so I'll suggest some selections to focus on.

The paper is organized as a series of named but unnumbered sections. Reading the ones marked with '+' in the list below (which amounts to pp. 435-445 and 454-465) should give you ample background for discussion (the numbers shown are the pages on which the sections begin). In the notes following the list, I suggest a few specific passages to focus on.

In the period between WWI and WWII, Holmes's ideas about the nature of law were taken to suggest that the appropriate way to understand the law was to study the human behavior that is associated with it. In approaching this sort of study, some focused on sociology and others on psychology. Llewellyn is an example of the former (while Jerome Frank is an example of the latter).

The two groups of sections I've suggested you focus on in Llewellyn's paper provide, first, Llewellyn's version of the Legal Realists' critique of traditional thinking about the law and, second, Llewellyn's positive suggestions about the direction a study of the law should take.

• Llewellyn takes the scheme of remedies, rights and rules, and interests that he presents in the first section of the first group to epitomize traditional thinking about law, and you will find references to this scheme throughout the paper. He summarizes his critical position regarding the scheme (and, really, the whole of what he argues for in the paper) on p. 442 at the end of the third section of the first group. In between, you will find some reasons for his critique; and, in the section on "Words v. Practice," he sharpens the distinction he sees between his perspective and the traditional one.
• Llewellyn develops some of the more distinctive features of his view of the law in the second group of sections. You can regard the first of them as a sort of introduction to the rest. In case Llewellyn gives the impression that the approach he favors was far outside the mainstream, it's worth noting that, of the list of people he cites on p. 454, one (Brandeis) was a Supreme Court justice and two more (Frankfurter and Douglas) later became justices. After digesting this introductory section, look for a few points in the remaining sections that you take to be especially significant, and we will spend some time discussing them. In general, be sure to note LLewellyn's emphasis on the particular, the narrow, the special case; this is characteristic of his style of thought.

You should also stand back from Llewellyn and compare him to others you have read. Ask first how close he is to Holmes. Is this the way that you would expect Holmes's view to be developed? Can you think of other ways of pursuing its implications?

Ask also how someone who thinks more in terms of rules (either Aquinas or Austin) might respond. How might they defend themselves against Llewellyn's criticisms in the first group of sections? And what do you think they would have to say about the aspects of the law he points to in the second group of sections?