Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-5xszh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-29T01:48:38.057Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Turning the Tables on Legal History: Parker's Common Law, History, and Democracy in America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

Parker's Common Law, History, and Democracy in America joins an ongoing effort to turn the tables on “law and …” by replacing the familiar question “What can history, sociology, and cultural studies tell us about law?” with a new line of inquiry asking “What can law teach us about the reach and limits of disciplinary thinking?” In his study of the reception of common law into nineteenth‐century American jurisprudence, Parker unearths a notion of time based on stability and repetition that challenges the dominant modernist and historicist approach to the writing of law and history. Parker, however, shies away from drawing the full implications of this move and it remains unclear whether, in the final analysis, he escapes the spell of legal historicism.

Type
Review Essay
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2015 

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

Berkowitz, Roger 2005. Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Constable, Marianne 1994. The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Lavi, Shai 2006. The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Lavi, Shai 2010. Turning the Tables on “Law and …”: A Jurisprudential Inquiry into Contemporary Legal Theory. Cornell Law Review 96 (4): 811–38.Google Scholar
Nonet, Philippe 2007. Time and Law. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8 (1): 311–22.Google Scholar
Parker, Kunal M 2011. Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Simpson, A. W. Brian 1973. The Common Law and Legal Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar