Academic

Sugarman on Horwitz's Influence

By Lawrence Solum

David Sugarman (Lancaster University - Law School) has posted ?Great Beyond His Knowing?: Morton Horwitz?s Influence on Legal Education and Scholarship in England, Canada and Australia (TRANSFORMATIONS IN AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY ? LAW, IDEOLOGY AND METHODS: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF MORTON J. HORWITZ, vol. 2, Daniel W. Hamilton and Alfred L. Brophy, eds., Harvard University Press, December 2010) on SSRN. Here is a portion of the (very long) abstract:

This essay describes and assesses Morton J. Horwitz?s contribution to the broadening of legal education and scholarship in England, Canada, and Australia. It argues that Horwitz?s work (principally The Transformation of American Law, 1780?1860 (1977) - Transformation I) provided an important stimulus at a critical time in the late 1970s and 1980s when legal education, legal scholarship, and legal history avowedly oriented toward anti-formalism and law and society were struggling to be legitimized beyond the United States. For a short but crucial period that subsequently appears as law?s tipping point - manifested in the move from an obsession with legal doctrine and legal institutions to the treatment of law in its larger socioeconomic context - Horwitz was an inspiration to those seeking to treat law as part of society, to transcend both the traditional chasm between law and justice and the dominant ahistorical tendencies in law schools, and to challenge legal history?s almost exclusive preoccupation with the law and legal institutions of medieval England. It is also contended that the questions that Horwitz asked have in some ways increased rather than diminished in importance since they were first posed in the 1970s and 1980s.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on January 18, 2011 (boomark / email).