Gregory E. Louis, The Jurisprudence of Trousered Apes, 69 UCLA L. REV. DISCOURSE 146 (2021). SSRN.
This Essay uses scholarly debate about the U.S. Supreme Court’s September 2021 decision on the Centers for Disease Control’s pandemic eviction ban to argue that legal elites’ view of the law is useless as it fails to capture the law’s social reality. As a more accurate lens, the Essay uplifts and sketches an alternative perspective on law it calls, ‘The Jurisprudence of Trousered Apes.’ It is the understanding that first-generation lawyers, such as the author and those the author teaches, uniquely contribute to legal analysis, capturing the law as experienced by those oppressed by it rather than contemplated by elites enveloped in its tutelary cocoon.