Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz

Overview

During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country’s crises.

In this book, Horwitz’s students re-examine legal history from America’s colonial era to the late twentieth century. They ask classic Horwitzian questions, of how legal doctrine, thought, and practice are shaped by the interests of the powerful, as well as by the ideas of lawyers, politicians, and others. The essays address current questions in legal history, from colonial legal practice to questions of empire, civil rights, and constitutionalism in a democracy. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674033467
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/31/2009
Series:	Harvard Law School Series
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Daniel W. Hamilton is Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law.

Alfred L. Brophy is Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Mary Sarah Bilder is Founders Professor of Law and Michael and Helen Lee Distinguished Scholar, Boston College Law School.

Alfred L. Brophy is Judge John J. Parker Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Charles Donahue, Jr., is Paul A. Freund Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Sally E. Hadden is Associate Professor of History at Western Michigan University.

Alison L. LaCroix is Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School.

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements

1. Debating the Transformation of American Law: James, Kent, Joseph Story, and the Legacy of the Revolution
   Daniel J. Husebosch
2. Colonial Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law
   Mary Sarah Bilder
3. Drawing and Redrawing the Line: The Pre-Revolutionary Origins of Federal Ideas of Sovereignty
   Alison LaCroix
4. DeSaussure and Ford: A Charleston Law Firm of the 1790s
   Sally E. Hadden
5. Utility, History, and the Rule of Law: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in Antebellum Jurisprudence
   Alfred L. Brophy
6. Stability and Change in Antebellum Property Law: Stare Decisis in Judicial Rhetoric
   Polly J. Price
7. “The Benefits and Evils of Competition”: James Coolidge Carter's Supreme Court Advocacy
8. On Limited Liability: A Speculative Essay on Evolution and Justification
   Gregory Mark
9. Transformations: Pluralism, Individualism, and Democracy
   Dalia Tsuk Mitchell
10. The Death and Rebirth of the Clear and Present Danger Test
    Stephen A. Siegel
11. Hugo Black's Civil Rights Movement
    Christopher Schmidt
12. Peregrinations of the Free Rider: The Changing Logics of collective Obligation
    Elizabeth Blackmar
13. Two Horwitzian Journeys
    Assaf Likhovski
14. Morton Horwitz: Legal Historian as Lawyer and Historian
    William Michael Treanor
15. Whither Legal History?
    Charles Donahue Jr.
16. The Moral Lives of Intellectual Properties
    Steven Wilf
17. Geniuses and Owners: The Construction of Inventors and the Emergence of American Intellectual Property
    Oren Bracha
18. Morton Horwitz and the Teaching of American Legal History
    Daniel W. Hamilton

• About the Contributors
• Index