Law's History: American Legal Thought And The Transatlantic Turn To History (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Reprint, 7/10/2014
EAN 9781107425088, ISBN10: 1107425085
Paperback, 582 pages, 23.4 x 15.6 x 3.3 cm
Language: English
This is a study of the central role of history in late nineteenth-century American legal thought. In the decades following the Civil War, the founding generation of professional legal scholars in the United States drew from the evolutionary social thought that pervaded Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. Their historical analysis of law as an inductive science rejected deductive theories and supported moderate legal reform, conclusions that challenge conventional accounts of legal formalism. Unprecedented in its coverage and its innovative conclusions about major American legal thinkers from the Civil War to the present, the book combines transatlantic intellectual history, legal history, the history of legal thought, historiography, jurisprudence, constitutional theory and the history of higher education.
Introduction
the historical study of law in the United States
Part I. The European Background
1. The historical nineteenth century
2. German legal scholarship
3. English legal scholarship
Sir Henry Maine
Part II. The Historical Turn in American Legal Scholarship
4. Henry Adams and his students
the origins of professional legal history in America
5. Melville M. Bigelow
from the history of Norman Procedure to protorealism
6. Holmes the historian
7. Thayer on the history of evidence
8. Ames on the history of the common law
9. The history of American constitutional law
10. The historical school of American jurisprudence
Part III. Maitland, Pound, and Pound's Successors
11. Maitland
the maturity of English legal history
12. Pound
from historical to sociological jurisprudence
13. Pound's successors
twentieth-century interpretations of late nineteenth-century American legal thought.