I'm delighted to see that the summer 2012 issue of Green Bag is up on the net; hard copies will be arriving soon. I have a short review of the first volume of G. Edward White's Law in American History in the issue.
Close readers of faculty lounge will recall that I'm a huge fan of White's work -- and that I wrote a little bit about the first volume earlier this year. Anyway, the essay is titled "Multivariate Analysis Through Narrative History," which alludes to how White depicts law as interaction with many variables -- like economy and political ideology -- and how it sometimes alters the trajectory of our nation, too. One of the things that White does that's particularly interesting is show how law is a part of culture -- and where many histories of law focus on law as the center piece of analysis, White shows that law is often the dependent variable or an incidental independent variable. Thus I toyed with the idea of calling this something like "embedded legal history" -- as in law embedded in culture.
A lot of people are going to be engaging the book and White's methodology for a long time to come.
Ok -- now back to work on another review of a very important book that's coming out soon from Cambridge, David Rabban's Law's History: American Legal History and the Transatlantic Turn to History. It will surprise no one (at least none of you who follow my writing closely, which may be none of you!) that I'm deeply interested in Rabban's story of the post-Civil War turn to history in American jurisprudence -- or that I see this as related in significant ways to the controversy over slavery. This is a major, major work of intellectual history and you should all be eagerly awaiting its appearance in December 2012!
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