Companion to American Legal History: Subjects and Methods

Now that the Companion to American Legal History that Sally Hadden and I co-edited is available, I want to talk a little more about what it says about the field of legal history.  By way of background, the Blackwell-Wiley companion volumes are designed to survey the field and give review essays that talk about what historians have written about; and sometimes at the end they point towards new directions in the field, as well.

I think the volume comes at precisely the right moment for American legal history, because the field is going in so many different directions at once.  A while back -- like when I was in graduate school -- the field was still dominated by studies of appellate opinions and jurisprudence.  So judges, treatise writers, and high brow legal thinkers predominated in the field.  There has been an extraordinary expansion in subjects over the past several decades.  Legal historians are looking closely at enslaved people, women, gay people, immigrants, workers, welfare recipients, as well as lawyers in big firms and small.  And they're looking at the procedures of justice of the peace and police courts, local trial courts, as well as state supreme courts and the United States Supreme Court.  The methods have broadened dramatically, too: we're interested in how fictional literature critiqued law (and in some cases supported it); how the technology of law brought down irrational authority and (more commonly) supported it.  As Sally and I say in the introduction -- and as I've observed elsewhere -- legal history is expanding so much in subjects and methods that it is beginning to look like almost all of history fits somewhere in its boundaries.

There's just a lot of literature to deal with and a great many moving parts.  Most of this is positive -- it's great to be in such a broad field.  One thing, however, is negative here.  And that is that the field is going in search of unifying principles.  Where once we knew how to talk about the pre-Civil War period, now there are so many different themes that it's sometimes hard to see how one important and deep book relates to another, even though they may be on what look like a similar topic.  One of my hopes is that in bringing a lot of the recent literature of legal history together in one place we'll see how people working in different periods are asking similar questions and how people working in the same period but from different vantages (either of sources or subjects) may have something to say to one another.  One of the topics that I'm increasingly interested in, for instance, is how the technology of law is used throughout our history to bring order to the community.

I'm hoping that the volume will spark some serious discussion of unifying questions.

As to content, the Companion is broken down into time period essays, from the seventeenth century through the late twentieth century (by Elizabeth Dale, Sally Hadden, Ellen Pearson, Roman Hoyos, Chris Schmidt, and me); they are followed by essays on groups of people: Native Americans (Christian McMillen), African Americans in the eras of slavery and freedom (by T.J. Davis and James Campbell respectively), Women (Felice Batlan),  Families (David Tanenhaus), Immigrants (Allison Brownell Tirres), and Lawyers (Mark Steiner).  The next and largest section has essays on subject areas, with chapters on the economy in early America (Christine Desan) and in the late nineteenth and twentieth century (Harwell Wells), labor (Deborah Dinner), poverty (Felicia Kornbluh and Karen Tani), taxes (Robin Einhorn), administrative state (Joanna Grisinger), law and religion (Steven Green), military (Elizabeth Hillman), criminal law (Elizabeth Dale), and intellectual property (Steven Wilf).  The final section is on legal thought, with chapters on law and literature (Jeannine DeLombard), early American legal thought (Steven J. Macias), nineteenth and early twentieth century jurisprudence (James Schmidt), critical legal studies (John H. Schlegel), and an international perspective on American legal thought (Clara Altman).

The book is priced for library sales -- it lists for nearly $200 (or $155 for the electronic edition); but if you order it from Wiley directly, use the code ALH13 for a 20% discount.   My hope is that if this interests you you'll pass word along to your favorite librarian.

Comments

[Matt Crow]

I might have to use my author discount for that- looks impressive, and necessary. (I'll have to check, I might have used up all of my credit on Wittgenstein stuff...) I'll definitely be requesting that our library purchase it.

This issue of the technology of law, I think, is a fascinating and promising one. And I would want to say that it has to include the history of legal learning and practice in addition to or as part of the history of books and manuscripts. It would be in many ways the history of a techne. Does the history of legal techniques count as the human side of the history of legal technology, and if so, if carried out in the spirit of rethinking our own practice, does it count as "applied legal history?"

[Alfred Brophy]

Thanks for the kind words, Matt -- my hope is that libraries will buy this. I understand a paperback edition priced for sales to individuals will be on the way, but not for a couple of years.

I'm increasingly using the law as technology theme. "Law" (everything from forms for mortgages and contracts to the criminal justice system) was a sophisticated and extremely useful technology. Just like the printing press, the gun, and the ax, law helped bring order and economic advance.

Not sure of the relationship of "law as technology" as a form of applied legal history....