Just published: Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Morton Horwitz

Transformations in American Legal History: Essays in Honor of Professor Morton J. Horwitz, edited by Daniel W. Hamilton and Alfred L. Brophy, has just been published by Harvard Law School. The essays were presented at a recent symposium at Harvard Law School. Here's the book description:

During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country’s crises.

Transformations in American Legal History celebrates Horwitz' career as a scholar and teaching, with contributions from nineteen of Horwitz' students and friends. Following the Foreword by Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan, eighteen essays re-examine legal history from America’s colonial era to the late twentieth century. The essays ask classic Horwitzian questions, of how legal doctrine, thought, and practice are shaped by the interests of the powerful, as well as by the ideas of lawyers, politicians, and others. They address current questions in legal history, from colonial legal practice to questions of empire, civil rights, and constitutionalism in a democracy. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.

You can find the book here and (with a pre-order discount) here.

Here's the table of contents:

Elena Kagan, Foreword

Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Debating the Transformation of American Law: James Kent, Joseph Story, and the Legacy of the Revolution

Mary Sarah Bilder, Colonial Constitutionalism and Constitutional Law

Alison LaCroix, Drawing and Redrawing the Line: The Pre-Revolutionary Origins of Federal Ideas of Sovereignty

Sally E. Hadden, DeSaussure and Ford: A Charleston Law Firm of the 1790s

Alfred L. Brophy, Utility, History, and the Rule of Law: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in Antebellum Jurisprudence

Polly J. Price, Stability and Change in Antebellum Property Law: Stare Decisis in Judicial Rhetoric

Lewis A. Grossman, ‘‘The Benefits and Evils of Competition’’: James Coolidge Carter’s Supreme Court Advocacy

Gregory Mark, On Limited Liability: A Speculative Essay on Evolution and Justification

Dalia Tsuk Mitchell, Transformations: Pluralism, Individualism, and Democracy

Stephen A. Siegel, The Death and Rebirth of the Clear and Present Danger Test

Christopher Schmidt, Hugo Black’s Civil Rights Movement

Elizabeth Blackmar, Peregrinations of the Free Rider: The Changing Logics of Collective Obligation

Assaf Likhovski, Two Horwitzian Journeys

William Michael Treanor, Morton Horwitz: Legal Historian as Lawyer and Historian

Charles Donahue Jr., Whither Legal History?

Steven Wilf, The Moral Lives of Intellectual Properties

Oren Bracha, Geniuses and Owners: The Construction of Inventors and the Emergence of American Intellectual Property

Daniel W. Hamilton, Morton Horwitz and the Teaching of American Legal History