Some interesting additions on Crosskey from Legal History Blog readers:
Dirk Hartog emailed me the following:
Brought back my own reading of Crosskey as a grad student. I think you capture much. Three things I would add:
1. Julius Goebel's review essay "Ex Parte Clio," in the Columbia Law
Review was, I believe the actual killer. I started reading Crosskey
because I read the review, and I wondered who could be so bad (and I
kind of hated Goebel for turning people off of legal history).
2. Crosskey's other significance was in debating Fairman on
Reconstruction. Here he was a lot more right we would say today than
Fairman.
3. Although he didn't do a good enough job of it, his technique of
constructing a dictionary of contemporary uses of language, is not that
different from what a lot of more rhetorical/linguistically oriented
historians did after the linguistic turn of the late 1970s and 1980s.
And a post by Mike Rappaport (Center for the Study of Constitutional Originalism, University of San Diego School of Law), entitled "Crosskey, Modern Originalism, and the Meese Justice Department."
