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Law and Society: Structuring Legal Revolutions, 1870-19201

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Christopher Waldrep
Affiliation:
San Francisco State University

Extract

In the 1970s and 1980s some of the most exciting work in legal history challenged late-nineteenth-century law as following a false formalism, only pretending to reason from abstract principles isolated from life's realities. Others took a different view, but these scholars insisted that law should be seen as political or economically determined rather than emerging from principle. Law was no more than a system of argumentative exchange. “Of dialectics there is no end,” one observed. In this view, principled law served only as a cover for economic avarice and political strength. If law merely reflects power, then there is really little reason for historians to study law or constitutionalism, and the recent migration of the historical study of constitutionalism, away from history departments and into law schools is well placed.

Type
Essay
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2006

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