As legal education faces fresh challenges and opportunities, and a growing literature calls for subversive new approaches, this book engages with vital questions about the place of history in the law school. How and why should we teach legal history? What is its place in the curriculum? What can different jurisdictions learn from each other?
This collection offers an overview and examples of cutting-edge practice in teaching legal history across the law curriculum, challenging expectations of its place and potential. The book’s three sections explore practices and possibilities in the core curriculum, in dedicated legal history courses and in law schools across the world. They highlight how legal history offers diverse and inclusive content, global perspectives, and transnational understandings to students. By exploring contributors’ own purposes and practices, they provide insight and fresh ideas on how and why readers can incorporate legal histories into their own teaching.
The volume will be an invaluable resource for all those involved in the teaching of law and the law school curriculum.
Edited by:
Caroline Derry,
Carol Howells
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 610g
ISBN: 9781032754970
ISBN 10: 1032754974
Series: Transforming Legal Histories
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 30 June 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Primary
,
Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction; Part 1: Legal history in the core curriculum; 1. Contextualising Law for both scholarship and practice: the contribution of Legal History; 2. Feminist Legal History at the Heart of the Law Curriculum; 3. Teaching Public Law through Empire’s Archive; 4. Using history to contextualise, diversify and criticise the contract law curriculum; Part 2: Legal history courses; 5. An immersive, cross disciplinary, approach to undergraduate legal history – ‘A Public Spectacle’: Murder and the Law in Nineteenth Century Newcastle; 6. Opportunities in teaching global legal history; 7. Anachronisms in legal historical education: pitfalls, benefits and their importance for every lawyer; Part 3: International perspectives; 8. Teaching English Legal History at the Continental University: A Case Study of the University of Lodz; 9. The purpose(s) of teaching legal history in contemporary Poland: Current situation and future perspectives; 10. Tracing Threads: Brazilian Legal History's Evolution, Research Reflections, and Educational Perspectives; 11. The contribution of Legal History to the curriculum of the modern law school: the Argentinian perspective; Conclusion
Caroline Derry is Professor of Feminism, Law and History at the Open University, UK, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Carol Howells is Senior Lecturer in Law at the Open University, UK.
