Some of the most exciting and innovative legal scholarship has been driven by historical curiosity. Legal history today comes in a fascinating array of shapes and sizes, from microhistory to global intellectual history. Legal history has expanded beyond traditional parochial boundaries to become increasingly international and comparative in scope and orientation. Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this timely compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of the historical analysis of law, past, present, and future. Part I explores the relationship between legal history and other disciplinary perspectives including economic, philosophical, comparative, literary, and rhetorical analysis of law. Part II considers various approaches to legal history, including legal history as doctrinal, intellectual, and social history. Part III focuses on the interrelation between legal history and jurisprudence by investigating the role and conception of historical inquiry in various models, schools, and movements of legal thought. Part IV traces the place and pursuit of historical analysis in various legal systems and traditions across time, cultures, and space. Finally, Part V narrows the Handbook's focus to explore several examples of legal history in action, including its use in various legal doctrinal contexts.
Introduction Part I Contexts: Locating Legal History 1: Maks Del Mar: Philosophical Analysis and Historical Inquiry: Theorising Normativity, Law and Legal Thought 2: Ron Harris: The History and Historical Stance of Law and Economics 3: Günter Frankenberg: Critical Histories of Comparative Law 4: Simon Stern: Literary Analysis of Law 5: Marianne Constable and Samera Esmeir: Rhetoric and the Possibilities of Legal History Part II Approaches: Conceptualizing Legal History 6: Markus Dubber: Legal History as Legal Scholarship: Doctrinalism, Interdisciplinarity, and Critical Analysis of Law 7: Laura F. Edwards: Law as Social History 8: Roy Kreitner: Legal History as Political History 9: Assaf Likhovski: The Intellectual History of Law 10: Joshua Getzler: Legal History as Doctrinal History 11: Bryan Wagner: Historical Method in the Study of Law and Culture 12: Anne Fleming: Legal History as Economic History 13: Carolyn Strange: Femininities and Masculinities: Looking Backward and Moving Forward in Criminal Legal Historical Gender Research 14: Angela Fernandez: Legal history as the History of Legal Texts 15: Katharina Isabel Schmidt: From Evolutionary Functionalism to Critical Transnationalism: Comparative Legal History, Aristotle to Present 16: Renisa Mawani: Archival Legal History: Toward the Ocean as Archive 17: Elizabeth Dale: Spelunking, or, Some Meditations on the New Presentism 18: Paul D. Halliday: Legal History: Taking the Long View 19: Daniel Klerman: Quantitative Legal History PART III Perspectives: Legal History in Modern Legal Thought 20: John V. Orth: Blackstone 21: Philip Schofield: Jeremy Bentham 22: Mathias Reimann: Historical Jurisprudence 23: Michael Lobban: Legal Formalism 24: Noga Morag-Levine: Sociological Jurisprudence and the Spirit of the Common Law 25: Dan Priel: The Return of Legal Realism 26: Catherine L. Fisk: &: Law Society in Historical Legal Research 27: Tom Johnson: Legal History and the Material Turn 28: Christopher Tomlins: Marxist Legal History 29: Justin Desautels-Stein: Structuralist and Poststructuralist Legal History 30: John Henry Schlegel: Sez Who? Critical Legal History without a Privileged Position 31: Emilios Christodoulidis and Johan van der Walt: Critical Legal Studies: Europe 32: Maria Drakopoulou: Feminist Historiography of Law: An Exposition and Proposition 33: H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr.: Critical Race Theory and the Political Uses of Legal History 34: David Minto: Queering Law's Empire: Domination and Domain in the Sexing Up of Legal History PART IV Traditions: Tracing Legal History 35: Clifford Ando: Roman Law 36: Karl Shoemaker: Medieval Canon Law 37: Kunal M. Parker: The Transformation of the Common Law: Modernism, History, and the Turn to Process 38: Heikki Pihlajamäki: Tracing Legal History in Continental Civil Law 39: Steven Wilf: Jewish Law 40: Lena Salaymeh: Historical Research on Islamic Law 41: Tahirih V. Lee: 'By the Light of the Moon': Looking for China's Rich Legal Tradition 42: Shaunnagh Dorsett: Aboriginal and Indigenous Law in Australia and New Zealand) 43: Thomas Duve: Indigenous Rights in Latin America 44: Mitra Sharafi: Indian Law 45: Doreen Lustig: Governance Histories of International Law 46: Paul McHugh: Imperial law: the Legal Historian and the Trials and Tribulations of an Imperial Past PART V Illustrations: Doing Things with Legal History 47: Gerry Leonard: A History of Violence: American Constitutional History and the Criminal System 48: Alfred L. Brophy: Historical Analysis in Property Law 49: Anat Rosenberg: What Do Contracts Histories Tell Us About Capitalism: From Origins and Distribution, to the Body and the Nation 50: Arlie Loughnan: Historical Analysis in Criminal Law: a Counter-History of Criminal Trial Verdicts 51: Martin Loughlin: The Historical Method in Public Law 52: David Schorr: Historical Analysis in Environmental Law 53: Norman W. Spaulding: Redeeming the American Founding? 54: Peter Lindseth: Foundings: Europe 55: R.P. Boast: Adjudication of Indigenous-Settler Relations 56: Leora Bilsky and Rachel Klagsbrun: Cultural Genocide: between Law and History 57: Sam Erman and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal: Historians' Amicus Briefs: Practice and Prospect
Markus D. Dubber, Professor of Law, Faculty of Law and Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto, Christopher Tomlins, James W. and Isabel Coffroth Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, University of California, Berkeley Christopher Tomlins is James W. and Isabel Coffroth Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of California, Berkeley Markus D. Dubber is Professor, Faculty of Law and Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto.
Reviews for The Oxford Handbook of Legal History
'[T]he team have completed their trip around legal history brilliantly and, to use a phrase, have thankfully left no stone unturned.' * Phillip Taylor MBE, Head of Chambers, and Elizabeth Taylor, Richmond Green Chamber *
