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Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law

Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law

Author: Robert W. Gordon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781316644003
Published In: August 2017
Format: Paperback
Jurisdiction: U.K. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Description
Contents

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Lawyers and judges often make arguments based on history - on the authority of precedent and original constitutional understandings. They argue both to preserve the inspirational, heroic past and to discard its darker pieces - such as feudalism and slavery, the tyranny of princes and priests, and the subordination of women. In doing so, lawyers tame the unruly, ugly, embarrassing elements of the past, smoothing them into reassuring tales of progress.

In a series of essays and lectures written over forty years, Robert W. Gordon describes and analyses how lawyers approach the past and the strategies they use to recruit history for present use while erasing or keeping at bay its threatening or inconvenient aspects. Together, the corpus of work featured in Taming the Past offers an analysis of American law and society and its leading historians since 1900.

Introduction

Part I. The Common Law Tradition in Legal Historiography:

1. The common law tradition in American legal historiography

2. Holmes' common law as legal and social science

Part II. Legal Historians:

3. James Willard Hurst, against the common law tradition - social-legal history's pioneer

4. Hurst recaptured

5. Morton Horwitz and his critics: a conflict of narratives

6. The elusive transformation

7. Method and politics: Horwitz on lawyers' uses of history

8. E. P. Thompson's legacies

9. Owen Fiss, the constitution of liberal order at the 'Troubled Beginnings of the Modern State'