ABSTRACT
M. Ethan Katsh and Ronald Collins and David Skover have been at the forefront of the exploration of electronic media's probable impact on the culture and organization of the law. This chapter lays out these scholars' predictions of how electronics will reorient legal culture and shows how they emerge from a particular theoretical tradition. It evaluates the content, intellectual antecedents, and strengths and weaknesses of this emerging body of scholarship and suggests future paths for development. In all three of these subdisciplines, the universalists have been losing ground to "contextualists". The contextualist critique of the universalists outside the field of law suggests four criticisms of the legal McLuhanites' approach. In sum, investigating the concomitant variation between communications systems and selected features of legal culture within a most similar systems design offers a partial check on both the false positives and false negatives associated with the McLuhanites' methods.
