The University of Pennsylvania Law Review: 150 Years of History (original) (raw)

Legal and Constitutional History

A decade ago I contributed to the Annual Survey of American Law my first review of the literature in the field of American legal history.' This year I would like to look back over the past ten with the hope of identifying at least some of the continuities and changes in the literature during that period. Continuities in the Literature.-Many legal historians continue to concentrate on discussions of factual data in their writings about the American legal past. Some legal historians, such as Robert Mennel in Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825-1940,2 have enlarged our factual knowledge on a variety of narrow topics. 3 Others are still writing books and articles which do little other than cover familiar factual ground. 4 Such works include Alan Reitman's

The Cambridge History of Law in America

2008

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutoty ex~eption and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements. no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

Future(s) of American Legal History

University of Toronto Law Journal, 2012

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...

Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society

2016

The late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century US economy maimed and killed employees at an astronomically high rate, while the legal system left the injured and their loved ones with little recourse. In the 1910s, US states enacted workers' compensation laws, which required employers to pay a portion of the financial costs of workplace injuries. Nate Holdren uses a range of archival materials, interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives, and compelling narration to criticize the shortcomings of these laws. While compensation laws were a limited improvement for employees in economic terms, Holdren argues that these laws created new forms of inequality, causing people with disabilities to lose their jobs, while also resulting in new forms of inhumanity. Ultimately, this study raises questions about law and class and about when and whether our economy and our legal system produce justice or injustice.

Introduction to Legal Studies Section

Concepts of Law in the Sciences, Legal Studies, and Theology; ed. Michael Welker and Gregor Etzelmüller, 2013

This article analyzes the shifting concepts of law in Western law and thought in early modern times and today. It first shows how the modern movement of interdisciplinary legal studies emerged as a corrective to the narrow positivist concepts of law that prevailed before the 1960s. It then shows how, in anticipation of modern methods, earlier Protestant legal thinkers had already worked hard to reconcile biblical and human laws, natural and positive laws, canon and civil laws, cases and legal codes in pursuit of a more integrated jurisprudence.