Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society: Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History

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.