Making Legal History

Today is the publication date of Making Legal History: Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson, which was edited by my friends Daniel Hulsebosch and R.B. Bernstein.  Cribbing now from the NYU Press webpage:

 One of the academy’s leading legal historians, William E. Nelson is the Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. For more than four decades, Nelson has produced some of the most original and creative work on American constitutional and legal history. His prize-winning books have blazed new trails for historians with their substantive arguments and the scope and depth of Nelson’s exploration of primary sources. Nelson was the first legal scholar to use early American county court records as sources of legal and social history, and his work (on legal history in England, colonial America, and New York) has been a model for generations of legal historians.

This book collects ten essays exemplifying and explaining the process of identifying and interpreting archival sources—the foundation of an array of methods of writing American legal history. The essays presented here span the full range of American history from the colonial era to the 1980s.Each historian has either identified a body of sources not previously explored or devised a new method of interrogating sources already known.The result is a kaleidoscopic examination of the historian’s task and of the research methods and interpretative strategies that characterize the rich, complex field of American constitutional and legal history.

The contributors are Sarah Barringer Gordon, Thomas C. Mackey, Daniel W. Hamilton, Cornelia H. Dayton, Sharon V. Salinger, Barry Cushman, Tomiko Brown Nagin, John Wertheimer, Susanna L. Blumenthal, John Fabian Witt, and Reuel Schiller.  Read the introduction here and view the table of contents here.  Congratulations to Bill and the editors for such a terrific volume!  Final thought on this -- I was pleasantly surprised to see my current student Heidi Rickes (and John Wertheimer's former student) cited in John's chapter.  Heidi's working on a study of jurisprudence at Davidson College before the Civil War.  Ought to be really interesting what she turns up.