BOOK: Caroline DERRY & Carol HOWELLS (eds.), Legal History in the Curriculum. Comparative Perspectives, Critical Approaches and Future Directions (London and New York: Routledge, 2025), 242 p. ISBN 9781032754970, € 116

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About the book:

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.

Table of contents:

Introduction (Caroline Derry, Carol Howells)

Legal history in the curriculum

• Contextualising law for both scholarship and practice. The contribution of legal history (Nandini Boodia-Canoo)
• Feminist legal history at the heart of the law curriculum (Caroline Derry)
• Teaching public law through empire's archive (Tom Frost)
• Using history to contextualise, diversify and critique the contract law curriculum (Fred Motson)

Legal history courses

• An immersive, cross-disciplinary approach to teaching undergraduate legal history. ‘A Public Spectacle’: Murder and the Law in Nineteenth Century Newcastle (Jennifer Aston, Helen Rutherford)
• Opportunities in teaching global legal history (Lorren Eldridge)
• Anachronisms in legal historical education. Pitfalls, benefits and their importance for every lawyer (Mariken Lenaerts)

International perspectives

• Teaching English legal history at the continental university. A case study of the University of Lodz (Łukasz Jan Korporowicz)
• The purpose(s) of teaching legal history in contemporary Poland. Current situation and future perspectives (Tomasz Kucharski)
• Tracing threads. Brazilian legal history's evolution, research reflections and educational perspectives (Kauan Juliano Cangussu)
• The contribution of legal history to the curriculum of the modern law school. The Argentinian perspective 1 (Viviana Kluger)

Conclusion. The law schools of tomorrow: a collection of future legal histories (Russell Sandberg)

 On the editors:

Caroline Derry is Professor of Feminism, Law and History at the Open University, UK, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She teaches across all levels from access to PhD. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality and the criminal law, legal history and transformative approaches to legal education

Carol Howells is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the Open University, UK. Her research interests include constitutional histories and legal traditions, histories of legal education, and marginalised legal histories

More information can be found here