I'm delighted to report that HUP is shipping the second volume of the Morton Horwitz festschrift (Transformations in American Legal History: Law, Ideology, and Methods -- Essays in Honor of Morton Horwitz). It's still listed as forthcoming at Barnes and Noble, so you can get it there at a steep "pre-publication" discount -- about $28. It will take a few more days to arrive, but you'll save about $15.
Over the course of the spring I hope to talk about a number of the individual essays, but right now I want to talk about the book overall. A lot of the essays are focused around assessments of Horwitz' work -- for instance, William Fisher's foreword talks about the continuity between questions that Horwitz addressed in Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (1977) and Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 (1992). Most people have seen those two books as rather different -- the first interested more in economic issues and common law; the second more jurisprudence and constitutional law. I think readers will particularly appreciate Frank Michelman's chapter that uses Horwitz' 1993 foreword as the take-off point for discussion.
Some of the other essays are focused on the growth of legal history as a discipline over Horwitz' career -- G. Edward White has a charming essay on happenings in legal history hiring at Harvard Law School, which has some choice vignettes from HLS faculty discussions. As always with White's work, there's a larger theme at work in the narrower story; it's about how the profession has expanded its vision since 1970. Then there are a bunch of essays on discrete topics, such as Fred Konfesky's investigation of the Boston context of the Charles River Bridge case.
The volume is large -- nearly 600 pages -- and there are thirty-four authors, so there's a lot going on here. As I say, I hope to talk more about individual essays later in the semester, but right now I want to think about this as a book reviewer might -- what's in here and what's it suggest about the state of the field. And, of course, what's missing? First, as to what's in here -- a lot of talk of labor, common law, constitutional law, intellectual property, immigration, the US in the world, and (thanks in particular to a fabulous essay by Felice Batlan) women. This illustrates I think just how much legal history has expanded its territory since the late 1960s when Horwitz first started working in it. There is less talk about race than I might have expected -- though because I work in the branch of the field where race is everything, perhaps that's an artifact of who I am. There's talk of Brown, to be sure -- such as Dean Martha Minow's essay on the road from Brown and Owen Fiss' reflections on the trip he and Horwitz made to the Supreme Court to see Cooper v. Aaron argued when they were still in school in New York City.
One thing that surprised me is that there wasn't more talk of critical legal studies. I know this because I spent a bunch of time working on the index -- always a good way to get to know a book. (Little aside here, one of these days we should talk about what you learn by doing an index.) I guess it's a measure of how much the legal academy has changed since the late 1980s that CLS isn't discussed more in the essays. Then again Horwitz' history was running a parallel track, not the same track, to a lot of the key CLS literature. There's also a strong tilt towards the twentieth century in the volume -- for all sorts of reasons. There's another thirty years of that history since Horwitz started working, of course. I've been surprised to see papers now on the era of Reagan at legal history workshops. I guess I figured that anything I lived through as an adult can't be legal history! But the field is turning serious attention to the 1970s and now 1980s and that helps explain the shift away from everything pre-Civil War.
Foreword, William W. Fisher, The Continuity of Morton Horwitz
PART I LEGAL HISTORY AND MORTON HORWITZ
1 Frank I. Michelman, A Civilized Man: Morton Horwitz Struggles with “Fundamental Law”
2 Martha Minow, Reading the World: Law and Social Science
3 Hendrik Hartog, Horwitz and the End of Socio-legal History: 1975
4 G. Edward White, The Origins of Modern American Legal History
5 Laura Kalman, Morton Horwitz and the General Historian
6 William E. Forbath, Courting the State: An Essay for Morton Horwitz
7 Robert W. Gordon, Method and Politics: Morton Horwitz on Lawyers’ Uses of History
8 James R. Hackney Jr., Morton Horwitz’s Methodological Transformation: Some Musings on Transformations I and II
PART II COLONIAL AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LAW
9 Christine Desan, Beyond Commodification: Contract and the Credit-Based World of Modern Capitalism
10 Robert J. Steinfeld, The Early Anti-majoritarian Rationale for Judicial Review
11 Alfred S. Konefsky, Simon Greenleaf, Boston Elites, and the Social Meaning and Construction of the Charles River Bridge Case
12 Christopher Tomlins, Toward a Materialist Jurisprudence
13 Allison Brownell Tirres, The View from the Border: Law and Community in the Nineteenth Century
PART III TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN LAW TO THE CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION
14 Felice Batlan, Notes from the Margins: Florence Kelley and the Making of Sociological Jurisprudence
15 Thomas A. Green, Conventional Morality and the Rule of Law: Freedom, Responsibility, and the Criminal Trial Jury in American Legal Thought, 1900–60
16 Edward A. Purcell Jr., Some Horwitzian Themes in the Law and History of the Federal Courts
17 Barbara Aronstein Black, Some Contract History: About Samuel Williston
18 Constance Backhouse, Anti-Semitism and the Law in Québec City: The Plamondon Case, 1910–15
19 Katherine V. W. Stone, John R. Commons and the Origins of Legal Realism; or, The Other Tragedy of the Commons
20 Robert A. Ferguson, Invading Panama: The Power of Circumstance in the Rule of Law
PART IV THE WARREN COURT
21 Tony A. Freyer, The Warren Court as History
22 Owen Fiss, Timeless Truths
23 William H. Simon, The Warren Court, Legalism, and Democracy: Sketch for a Critique in a Style Learned from Morton Horwitz
24 Lawrence M. Friedman, Notes toward a Sociology of Human Rights
25 Mark Tushnet, The Warren Court and the Limits of Justice
26 Elizabeth Borgwardt, “Constitutionalizing” Human Rights: The Rise and Rise of the Nuremberg Principles
PART V THE PAST AND FUTURE OF LEGAL HISTORY
27 Yochai Benkler, Transformations in the Digitally Networked Environment
28 Sanford Levinson and Jack M. Balkin, Morton Horwitz Wrestles with the Rule of Law
29 William E. Nelson, Horwitz and the Direction of Legal Thought
30 David Sugarman, “Great Beyond His Knowing”: Morton Horwitz’s Influence on Legal Education and Scholarship in England, Canada, and Australia
PART VI APPRECIATIONS
31 Alfred L. Brophy, My Morty
32 Pnina Lahav, Introducing Mort Horwitz
More on the first volume, including the table of contents, is here.
Update as of January 27: Now both amazon and barnesandnoble are shipping Transformations and it's amazon that has the better price -- just under $28.
Update as of January 29: Prices keep changing -- now amazon's selling it for for about $33. There's more volatility than in the stock market, it seems.
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