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Papers by Angela Fernandez
University of Toronto Law Journal, 2012
Critical Legal History (CLH) is currently being subjected to sustained critique and re-examinatio... more Critical Legal History (CLH) is currently being subjected to sustained critique and re-examination by some legal historians. This review essay looks at this debate in the context of two recent books on American legal history: Christopher Tomlins’s Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (2010) and Laura Edwards’s The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). In keeping with the thrust of CLH scholarship, both books problematize the connection between law and narratives of freedom and equality in American history, and both show law as a significant force for non-freedom and inequality. Yet, in a recent symposium on Robert Gordon’s classic article ‘Critical Legal Histories’ (1984), both authors chose to distance themselves from CLH. After explaining what is significant and important about each book, this review essay describes the debate in that symposium. Notwithsta...
University of Toronto Law Journal, 2012
Critical Legal History (CLH) is currently being subjected to sustained critique and re-examinatio... more Critical Legal History (CLH) is currently being subjected to sustained critique and re-examination by some legal historians. This review essay looks at this debate in the context of two recent books on American legal history: Christopher Tomlins’s Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (2010) and Laura Edwards’s The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (2009). In keeping with the thrust of CLH scholarship, both books problematize the connection between law and narratives of freedom and equality in American history, and both show law as a significant force for non-freedom and inequality. Yet, in a recent symposium on Robert Gordon’s classic article ‘Critical Legal Histories’ (1984), both authors chose to distance themselves from CLH. After explaining what is significant and important about each book, this review essay describes the debate in that symposium. Notwithsta...