Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dlnhk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T22:54:50.982Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Critical Legal Histories Revisited”: A Response

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Robert W. Gordon
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The author responds to comments reappraising “Critical Legal Histories” (CLH) (1984). CLH critiqued “evolutionary functionalism,” the idea that law is a functional response to a typical modernizing process. CLH argued that “society” was partly constituted of legal elements and that law was too indeterminate to have reliably regular functional effects. CLH has been misinterpreted as calling for a return to internal histories of “mandarin” doctrine: all it said was that some doctrinal histories were valuable, without privileging them. This response clarifies that the relations of law to society and social change, and of high-level official law to everyday local law are distinct issues. CLH is mostly moot today, since social-legal historians have incorporated its insight that legal concepts are embedded in everyday social practice. But other fields have revived deterministic Whiggish accounts of progressive development and of law functional to it—to which CLH's critique still seems relevant.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , Winter 2012 , pp. 200 - 215
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alexander, Gregory. 1985. The Dead Hand and the Law of Trusts in the Nineteenth Century. Stanford Law Review 37:1189–266.Google Scholar
Aron, Raymond. 2004. Main Currents in Sociological Thought (2 vols.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Balkin, Jack, and Siegel, Reva. 2006. Principles, Practices and Social Movements. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 154:927–50.Google Scholar
Blumenthal, Susanna. 2006. Deviance of the Will: Policing the Boundary of Testamentary Freedom in Nineteenth Century America. Harvard Law Review 119:960–1035.Google Scholar
Bone, Robert G. 1986. Normative Theory and Legal Doctrine in American Nuisance Law. Southern California Law Review 59:1101–226.Google Scholar
Burrow, John. 1966. Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cohen, Morris. 1927. Property and Sovereignty. Cornell Law Quarterly 13:8–30.Google Scholar
Cook, Walter Wheeler. 1935. Rescission of Bargains Made on Sunday. North Carolina Law Review 13:165–95.Google Scholar
Corbin, Arthur. 1917. Offer and Acceptance and Some of the Resulting Legal Relations. Yale Law Journal 26:169–206.Google Scholar
Corbin, Arthur. 19501993. Corbin on Contracts: A Treatise on the Working Rules of Contract Law. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing.Google Scholar
Cott, Nancy. 2000. Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert. 1983. Nomos and Narrative. Harvard Law Review 87:4–68.Google Scholar
Dubler, Ariela. 2003. In the Shadow of Marriage: Single Women and the Legal Construction of Family and the State. Yale Law Journal 112:1641–716.Google Scholar
Edwards, Laura. 2009. The People and Their Peace. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Fernandez, Angela, and Dubber, Markus, ed. Forthcoming. The Treatise in Legal History .Google Scholar
Forbath, William. 1991. Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Freeman, Richard B., and Rogers, Joel. 1999. What Workers Want. Ithaca, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M. 1977. Book Review: Heart Against Head; Perry Miller and the Legal Mind. Yale Law Journal 77:1244–59.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M. 2007. Guarding Life's Dark Secrets: Legal Controls over Reputation, Propriety and Secrecy . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M. 2009. Dead Hands: A Social History of Wills, Trusts and Inheritance Law. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Green, Leon. 19281929. The Duty Problem in Negligence Cases. Columbia Law Review 28:1014–45; 29:255–84.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa. 2007. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gross, Ariela. 2008. What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Grossberg, Michael. 1996. A Judgment for Solomon: The D'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hale, Robert M. 1923. Coercion and Distribution in a Supposedly Non‐Coercive State. Political Science Quarterly 38:470–78.Google Scholar
Harris, Ron. 2000. Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 2000. Man and Wife in America: A History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hartog, Hendrik. 2011. Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Morton J. 1977. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Google Scholar
Hulsebosch, Daniel. 2005. Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Hurst, James Willard. 1956. Law and the Balance of Power in the Nineteenth Century United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Jaynes, Gerald. 1986. Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882 . New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kelman, Mark. 1987. A Guide to Critical Legal Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. 1976. Form and Substance in Private Law Adjudication. Harvard Law Review 89:1675–778.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. 2006. The Rise and Fall of Classical Legal Thought. Washington, DC: Beard Books.Google Scholar
Kim, Pauline T. 1997. Bargaining with Incomplete Information: A Study of Worker Perceptions of Legal Protection in an At‐Will World. Cornell Law Review 83:105–60.Google Scholar
Klerman, Daniel, and Mahoney, Paul. 2007. Legal Origin? Journal of Comparative. Economics 35:278–93.Google Scholar
Kostal, Rande. 1990. Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825–1875 . Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Kramer, Larry D. 2004. The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lamoreaux, Naomi, and Rosenthal, Jean‐Louis. 2005. Legal Regime and Contractual Flexibility: A Comparison between Businesses' Organizational Choices in France and the United States during the Era of Industrialization. American Law & Economics Review 7:28–61.Google Scholar
Maitland, F. W. 1911. Review of Seebohm. In Tribal System in Wales. Collected Papers, ed. Fisher, H. A. L., vol. 3, 1–10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Maitland, F. W. 19651995. Letters of Frederic William Maitland. Ed. Fifoot, C. H. S. and Zutschi, P. N. R. London: Selden Society.Google Scholar
Mensch, Elizabeth. 1982. The History of Mainstream Legal Thought, in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, ed. Kairys, D., 18–37. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. 1996. The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth‐Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Ohnesorge, John K. M. 2007. The Rule of Law. Annual Review of Law & Social Science 3:99–114.Google Scholar
Parker, Kunal M. 2011. Common Law, History and Democracy in America, 1790–1990. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pomerantz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Pope, James Gray. 1997. Labor's Constitution of Freedom. Yale Law Journal 106:941–1032.Google Scholar
Post, Robert, and Siegel, Reva. 2007. Roe Rage: Democratic Constitutionalism and Backlash. Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 42:373–434.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1909. Liberty of Contract. Yale Law Journal 18:454–87.Google Scholar
Rabban, David M. 2010. Rethinking Classical Legal Thought. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Rose, Carol. 1986. The Comedy of the Commons. University of Chicago Law Review 53:711–81.Google Scholar
Ross, Richard. 1998. The Commoning of the Common Law. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 146:323–462.Google Scholar
Rostow, Walt W. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rubin, Paul H. 1977. Why Is the Common Law Efficient? Journal of Legal Studies 6:51–63.Google Scholar
Scheiber, Harry N. 1973. Property Law, Expropriation, and Resource Allocation by Government: The United States, 1789–1910. Journal of Economic History 33:232–51.Google Scholar
Scott, Rebecca. 2005. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Siegel, Reva. 2008. Dead or Alive: Originalism as Popular Constitutionalism in Heller. Harvard Law Review 122:121–245.Google Scholar
Siegel, Stephen A. 1990. Historism in Late Nineteenth‐Century Constitutional Thought. Wisconsin Law Review 1990:1431–1548.Google Scholar
Smith, Adam. 1776 1979. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Ed. Campbell, D. and Skinner, A. S. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Stanley, Amy Dru. 1998. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation . New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stein, Peter. 1980. Legal Evolution: The Story of an Idea. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Steinfeld, Robert. 2001. Coercion, Contract and Free Labor in the 19th Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tamanaha, Brian. 2010. Beyond the Formalist‐Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher. 1993. Law, Labor and Ideology in the Early American Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Trubek, David. 1972. Max Weber on Law and the Rise of Capitalism. Wisconsin Law Review 1972:720–53.Google Scholar
Trubek, David, and Santos, Alvaro, ed. 2006. The New Law and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Upham, Frank. 2002. Mythmaking in the Rule of Law Orthodoxy. Carnegie Endowment Rule of Law Working Papers 30.Google Scholar
Wilf, Stephen. 2010. Law's Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian. 2004. The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Woodman, Harold. 1995. New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Post‐Bellum Agricultural South. Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press.Google Scholar