Harvard Law School Professor Adrian Vermeule ’93 is the co-editor of a new online review of books, The New Rambler. Co-edited by Vermeule, Stanford University Professor Blakey Vermeule and University of Chicago Law Professor Eric Posner, The New Rambler publishes reviews of books about ideas, including literary fiction. It takes its name from Samuel Johnson’s periodical, “The Rambler.”
“We have an outstanding group of contributors lined up already,” said Adrian Vermeule.
Recent reviews include “Guilty Pleasures,” a review by Harvard Law School Professor Oren Bar-Gill LL.M. 01 S.J.D. 05 of “Happiness and the Law,” by John Bronsteen, Christopher Buccafusco and Jonathan S. Masur; and “Where do norms come from,” a review by Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein of Edna Ullmann-Margalit’s 1977 book “The emergence of norms.” Adrian Vermeule wrote “A portrait of equilibrium,” a review of Daniel Ernst’s book “Tocqueville’s Nightmare: The administrative state emerges in America, 1900-1940.”
The publication accepts both long and short reviews. Short reviews, typically less than 1,000 words, similar to the type that appears in many academic journals, generally give a brief summary and some criticisms, emphasizing a bottom-line assessment of the book’s contribution. Long reviews are typically in the style of the former The New Republic or New York Review of Books, where the reviewer puts the book in context and engages more elaborately with the book’s argument.
Adrian Vermeule, whose research focuses on administrative law, the administrative state, the design of institutions, and constitutional theory, serves as editor for Public Law, Legal Theory, Law and Politics, History, Religion reviews. The author or co-author of eight books, most recently “The Constitution of Risk” (2014) and “The System of the Constitution” (2012), he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012.
Eric Posner, whose research interests are international law and constitutional law, oversees Social Sciences, International Relations, Business, Political Science and other reviews for The New Rambler. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Law Institute and the author or co-author of more than ten books, most recently “The Twilight of International Human Rights” (Oxford, 2014) and “Economic Foundations of International Law” (with Alan Sykes) (Harvard, 2013).
Blakey Vermeule’s research interests are neuroaesthetics, cognitive and evolutionary approaches to art, philosophy and literature, British literature from 1660-1820, post-Colonial fiction, satire, and the history of the novel. She is The New Rambler’s editor for Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, the Arts and Humanities, the Sciences reviews. She is the author of “The Party of Humanity: Writing Moral Psychology in Eighteenth-Century Britain” (2000) and “Why Do We Care About Literary Characters?” (2009), both from The Johns Hopkins University Press.
The project is supported by the University of Chicago School of Law and Gifford Combs.