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Lochner v. New York and the Challenge of Legal Historiography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Howard Schweber
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Abstract

This essay reviews three works addressing the famous case Lochner v. New York: David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (2011); Howard Gillman, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers (1992); and Victoria Nourse, “A Tale of Two Lochners: The Untold History of Substantive Due Process and the Idea of Fundamental Rights” (2009). The author argues that a comparison of these three works raises historiographic issues relating to legal historians’ deployment of assumptions about the continuity of legal development, the role of key actors or social forces, and the autonomy of legal development in relation to other societal events. Further, the essay argues that there is a tendency toward “law school historiography,” referring to the selection of historiographic approach to suit a preconceived jurisprudential narrative that appears when the subject is the history of legal and, especially, constitutional doctrine.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Winter 2014 , pp. 242 - 274
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2014 

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