The Oxford Handbook of Legal History

Markus D. Dubber is Professor of Law & Criminology and Director of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto.

Christopher Tomlins is Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Affiliated Research Professor of the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. His research concentrates on Anglo-American legal history from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. His most recent books are Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2017), co-edited with Justin Desautels-Stein, The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (Oxford University Press, 2018), co-edited with Markus Dubber, and In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020).

Cite

Dubber, Markus D., and Christopher Tomlins (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Legal History , Oxford Handbooks ( 2018; online edn, Oxford Academic , 10 Sept. 2018 ), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198794356.001.0001, accessed 6 Sept. 2024.

Abstract

Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of historical analysis of law, past, present, and future. Part I explores the relationship between legal history as historical analysis of law and other scholarly projects, including history unmodified and legal history as a subspecies of historical—rather than of legal—scholarship, as well as other modes of critical analysis of law, such as economic, philosophical, sociological, comparative, literary, and rhetorical approaches. Part II considers various approaches to legal history as a scholarly enterprise, ranging from legal history as social history to more recent projects such as legal history and digital humanities and empirical legal history. Part III focuses on the interrelation between legal history and jurisprudence by investigating the role and conception of historical inquiry in various models, schools, and movements of legal thought. Part IV traces the place and pursuit of historical analysis in various legal systems and traditions across time, culture, and space, including, among others, ancient law, Aboriginal law, and global law. Finally, Part V narrows the Handbook’s focus to explore several examples of legal history in action, including its use in various legal doctrinal contexts, during times of national, and supranational, community building, and in various modes of legal intervention in specific disputes.

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