[This was the second part of the Introduction to the Law & Society Review’s 1975 Festschrift for Hurst. Much has since been written on Hurst’s contributions to legal history, some of the best of it in a Symposium on Hurst’s work in 18 Law & History Review 1 (2000).]

[This short essay appeared in a Symposium organized by the Georgetown Law Review to memorialize E. P. Thompson after his death in August, 1993. 82 Georgetown Law Review 2005 (1994). Thompson did not see himself as a “legal” historian, but was one of the first to recognize that both official law and popular law and custom pervasively structured social relationships, and he exerted a powerful influence on American as well as British social-legal historiography.]

[This essay is a somewhat revised and expanded version of the Thomas M. Cooley Lectures given at the University of Michigan Law School in February of 1993.]

[This was the second part of the Introduction to the Law & Society Review’s 1975 Festschrift for Hurst. Much has since been written on Hurst’s contributions to legal history, some of the best of it in a Symposium on Hurst’s work in 18 Law & History Review 1 (2000).]

[This essay first appeared in 10 Law & Society Review 9 (1975), as the first part of an introduction to a Festschrift for the Wisconsin social-legal historian James Willard Hurst. Its aim was to sketch the history of American legal historiography before Hurst came on the scene and to explain how Hurst broke with the tradition of largely “internal” legal history. (In this collection, the essay is split into two parts, with the second part on Hurst’s contributions – “James Willard Hurst – Social Legal History’s Pioneer” – in the section on “Legal Historians” that follows this one.) Since this was written several notable works have amplified and added much valuable detail to the account given here – most especially of legal history-writing in the nineteenth century: John Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (1981); Stephen Siegel, “Historism in Late Nineteenth Century Constitutional Thought,” 1990 Wis. L. Rev. 1431; Kunal Parker, Common Law, History and Democracy in America, 1790–1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism (2011); and David M. Rabban, Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (2012).]

[This piece was published as part of a Symposium commemorating the 100th anniversary of O. W. Holmes, Jr., The Common Law in 10 Hofstra Law Review 719 (1982). Its attempt to place Holmes’s legal theory in its formative intellectual context has been followed by a massive and distinguished literature on Holmes. I think the best of this work is a fine intellectual biography by G. Edward White, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (1993); a thorough and probing examination of Holmes’s contributions to and views on legal history in David M. Rabban, Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (2013); Louis Menand’s illuminating exploration of Holmes’s pragmatist Cambridge circle in The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (2001); and especially Thomas Grey’s penetrating essay on “Holmes and Legal Pragmatism,” 42 Stanford Law Review 787 (1989). Grey’s essay has convinced me that I was wrong in the piece that follows to see the conceptualism of Holmes’s early essays in analytical jurisprudence as existing in unresolved contradiction with his later historicism. Grey persuasively argues that Holmes’s purpose in refining the logical arrangement of legal doctrine into conceptual categories was the modest pragmatic one of making current law more accessible and predictable to lawyers. But his historicism taught him that any such arrangements, including his own, must be transient and provisional, saturated as all law is with the contingent and irrational cultural beliefs and political struggles of its time and place.]

[This was my brief contribution to the Symposium on Willard Hurst in 18 Law & History Review 167 (2000). The Symposium generally is the best source of recent reassessments of Hurst’s work and influence].

[This essay consolidates drafts of several public talks given in various venues, ranging from the scholarly (Wesleyan University, Yale Law School, University of Southern California) to the political (American Constitution Society meetings) between about 2005 and the present day. These talks were more frankly partisan and polemical than most of my writing and possibly less generous to opposing views than they should have been; but their main points still seem to me basically right.]

[This essay, published in 90 Yale Law Journal 1017 (1981) was written for a Symposium on Legal Scholarship held at Yale Law School in 1981. It was my first attempt to explain the nature of the threat that I believe historicism poses to legal theory and legal reasoning; and to describe the leading ways we have of coping with the threat. Prominent among those ways is what is called here “adaptation theory,” which in “Critical Legal Histories,” the essay that follows, becomes “evolutionary functionalism.”]

[This was written for a Symposium on the work of Morton Horwitz at the University of Tulsa Law School and originally published in 37 Tulsa Law Review 915 (2002).]