Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Hackney on Horwitz's Transformation 1 and 2

James R. Hackney, Jr., Northeastern University School of Law, has posted his contribution to last year's conference in honor of Morton J. Horwitz. The essay, entitled Morton Horwitz's Methodological Transformation: Some Musings on Transformations I and II, will appear in volume 2 of the festschrift Transformations in American Legal History, ed. Daniel W. Hamilton and Alfred L. Brophy, forthcoming in 2010. (Volume 1, I believe, is available now.) Here is the abstract:
This essay places Morton Horwitz's two classic texts, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (1973) ("Transformation I") and The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 (1992) ("Transformation II") in historical and theoretical relief. The analysis is done on three levels. There is a discussion that draws upon Horwitz's biography as conveyed in an interview of Horwitz conducted by the author. There is also an examination of the two texts and their relationship to changes in legal academia. The discussion of the legal academy leads to a broader historical analysis framing Transformation I and Transformation II within the contours of intellectual trends beyond the legal academy.