BOOK: Markus D. DUBBER & Christopher TOMLINS (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Oxford: OUP, 2018), 1200 p. ISBN 9780198794356, 175 USD

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Book abstract:

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, or 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.

Table of contents:
 Introduction
Part I Contexts: Locating Legal History
1. Philosophical Analysis and Historical Inquiry: Theorising Normativity, Law and Legal Thought, Maks Del Mar
2. The History and Historical Stance of Law and Economics, Ron Harris
3. Critical Histories of Comparative Law, Gunter Frankenberg
4. Literary Analysis of Law, Simon Stern 5. Rhetoric and the Possibilities of Legal History, Marianne Constable and Samera Esmeir

PART II Approaches: Conceptualizing Legal History
6. Legal History as Legal Scholarship: Doctrinalism, Interdisciplinarity, and Critical Analysis of Law, Markus Dubber
7. Law as Social History, Laura F. Edwards
8. Legal History as Political History, Roy Kreitner
9. The Intellectual History of Law, Assaf Likhovski
10. Legal History as Doctrinal History, Joshua Getzler
11. Historical Method in the Study of Law and Culture, Bryan Wagner
12. Legal History as Economic History, Anne Fleming
13. Femininities and Masculinities: Looking Backward and Moving Forward in Criminal Legal Historical Gender Research, Carolyn Strange
14. Legal history as the History of Legal Texts, Angela Fernandez
15. From Evolutionary Functionalism to Critical Transnationalism: Comparative Legal History, Aristotle to Present, Katharina Isabel Schmidt
16. Archival Legal History: Toward the Ocean as Archive, Renisa Mawani
17. Spelunking, or, Some Meditations on the New Presentism, Elizabeth Dale
18. Legal History: Taking the Long View, Paul D. Halliday
19. Quantitative Legal History, Daniel Klerman

PART III Perspectives: Legal History in Modern Legal Thought
20. Blackstone, John V. Orth
21. Jeremy Bentham, Philip Schofield
22. Historical Jurisprudence, Mathias Reimann
23. Legal Formalism, Michael Lobban
24. Sociological Jurisprudence and the Spirit of the Common Law, Noga Morag-Levine
25. The Return of Legal Realism, Dan Priel
26. &: Law Society in Historical Legal Research, Catherine L. Fisk
27. Legal History and the Material Turn, Tom Johnson
28. Marxist Legal History, Christopher Tomlins
29. Structuralist and Poststructuralist Legal History, Justin Desautels-Stein 30. Sez Who? Critical Legal History without a Privileged Position, John Henry Schlegel
31. Critical Legal Studies: Europe, Emilios Christodoulidis and Johan van der Walt
32. Feminist Historiography of Law: An Exposition and Proposition, Maria Drakopoulou
33. Critical Race Theory and the Political Uses of Legal History, H. Timothy Lovelace, Jr.
34. Queering Law's Empire: Domination and Domain in the Sexing Up of Legal History, David Minto

PART IV Traditions: Tracing Legal History
35. Roman Law, Clifford Ando
36. Medieval Canon Law, Karl Shoemaker
37. The Transformation of the Common Law: Modernism, History, and the Turn to Process, Kunal M. Parker
38. Tracing Legal History in Continental Civil Law, Heikki Pihlajamaki
39. Jewish Law, Steven Wilf
40. Historical Research on Islamic Law, Lena Salaymeh
41. 'By the Light of the Moon': Looking for China's Rich Legal Tradition, Tahirih V. Lee
42. Aboriginal and Indigenous Law in Australia and New Zealand), Shaunnagh Dorsett
43. Indigenous Rights in Latin America, Thomas Duve
44. Indian Law, Mitra Sharafi
45. Governance Histories of International Law, Doreen Lustig
46. Imperial law: the Legal Historian and the Trials and Tribulations of an Imperial Past, Paul McHugh

PART V Illustrations: Doing Things with Legal History
47. A History of Violence: American Constitutional History and the Criminal System, Gerry Leonard
48. Historical Analysis in Property Law, Alfred L. Brophy
49. What Do Contracts Histories Tell Us About Capitalism: From Origins and Distribution, to the Body and the Nation, Anat Rosenberg
50. Historical Analysis in Criminal Law: a Counter-History of Criminal Trial Verdicts, Arlie Loughnan
51. The Historical Method in Public Law, Martin Loughlin
52. Historical Analysis in Environmental Law, David Schorr
53. Redeeming the American Founding?, Norman W. Spaulding
54. Foundings: Europe, Peter Lindseth
55. Adjudication of Indigenous-Settler Relations, R.P. Boast
56. Cultural Genocide: between Law and History, Leora Bilsky and Rachel Klagsbrun
57. Historians' Amicus Briefs: Practice and Prospect, Sam Erman and Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

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