This afternoon's mail brought the first volume of G. Edward White's planned three volume history of American law -- Law in American History: From the Colonial Years Through The Civil War. This is a fabulous book. As long-time readers of the faculty lounge might suspect, this is the volume that's of most interest to me, because my primary area of interest is the pre-Civil War South (though I sometimes glance backwards to seventeenth century Quaker thought and also forward to African American thought in the early twentieth century). When I first started working on the pre-Civil War era one of my early and important guides was White's Marshall Court and Cultural Change, 1815-1835 -- and it's a book I still use as a model for how to integrate constitutional doctrine into its intellectual context. I highly, highly recommend Marshall Court to people looking for a one volume introduction to the methods -- and elegance -- of legal and constitutional history.
The book is beautifully produced and it will occupy a place of pride on my shelf next to several of White's other books -- Marshall Court, the American Judicial Tradition, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Inner Self, and Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History (which I blogged about some over at legal history blog some years ago). Though, for those of you who're wanting to read some of it immediately without waiting for your copy to arrive, many of the chapters are on White's ssrn page. My favorite chapter (on slavery, the Constitution, and the coming of Civil War), is here, for instance. This is a really interesting model for making scholarship available -- and one that White has engaged in before. You may also recall that his introduction The Common Law is HUP's website, too. This model deserves a lot more comment at some point. I'm guessing that White and OUP made the judgment that putting chapters up for free help get people interested in the full book -- probably a decent calculation. It's certainly the right decision from the perspective of disseminating knowledge.
What particularly interests me about the Civil War chapter is how much it's tied to the military and political history of the War. That chapter, but the whole book, really, is legal history deeply embedded in American history -- and it is legal history like I have never seen it before. Where White's earlier work was grounded first, I'd say, in the methods of intellectual history, this is grounded more in economic, social, and military history. I look forward to what are certain to be the many and wide-ranging assessments of how White changes the methods of legal history and the questions we expect it to answer. One of the things I think this book does is place American legal history at the center of the story of American history, so that it tells the story of our nation through the eyes of law, lawyers, and judges. I think this is a critical methodological move.
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