When I first began teaching I was rather optimistic about developing
synergies between teaching and research.
And, so, I choose this title as a rubric for some of the readings that I
wanted, and needed, to do for my own research projects. As a new faculty member, I was also
apprehensive about attracting students to a new course, and so I figured a capacious
and bombastic title like this one might appeal to law students and graduate
students in history and the social sciences.
It turns out I was half right.
Like most overeager instructors, at first, I tried to do too
much in one course. As a result, many
traditional law students dropped the class, especially once they saw the
reading list, while students from the social sciences or those law students
with strong backgrounds in the humanities and social sciences generally stuck around. Originally, I organized the course into four
units: (1) “Classical Social Theories on Law and Political Economy” using
excerpts from Adam Smith, Karl Mark, Max Weber, et al.; (2) “Sampling the
Historical Canon on Law and American Development,” reading the works of Hurst, Scheiber,
Horwitz, et al.; (3) “Revising the Canon: New Works on Law and Political
Economy,” using recent monographs by legal, political, and economic historians;
and (4) a “Case Study of the Historical Development of American Public
Finance,” assigning both old and new texts on U.S. fiscal policy. I usually tried to conclude the course with
some kind of comparative perspective on global capitalism (I’d be happy to
share the syllabus with others interested in the course).
After teaching this course, with the same pompous title, for
a few years, I came to realize that there were particular kinds of students
drawn to the class. It was often law
students interested in transactional law, unsurprisingly, who wanted to get a
broader historical perspective on some of the work they were about to engage in
as practicing lawyers. I tried to appeal
to this group by pitching the class as an opportunity “to see the forest for
the trees.” Before they embarked on a
career negotiating and drafting asset purchase agreements and securities
offerings, they could benefit from a bird’s eye view of the historical roots of
our modern capitalist system. These
students enjoyed reading some of the canonical books assigned. By contrast, the few grad students who took
the course – it seemed to draw occasionally from sociology and anthropology
rather than history – enjoyed the more recent interdisciplinary work on
revising the canon. The social theory
section didn’t go over so well with either group – nobody it seems likes
reading a couple hundred pages of Marx and Weber.
Gradually, I learned to do more with less, cutting sections
of the social theory readings, and choosing shorter books for the recent
literature sections. Still, I benefited
enormously from those students who came to the material with a fresh
perspective. Many of them challenged the
assumptions that scholars steeped in a literature take for granted. In fact, it was often my most practically-minded students – the true believers of the beneficence of "free markets" –
who pushed the importance of economic forces and private ordering. At the behest of some of the more thoughtful
students, I altered the readings over time to add a more diverse set of voices, including Milton Friedman and Robert Higgs.
Because this was a writing course, students researched and wrote
papers some of which were ultimately published as student notes. Eventually, I learned that working with
students’ draft papers was frequently a more useful pedagogical exercise than
assigning big books and turgid texts that few students could get through. I started devoting more class time, toward
the end of the term, to workshops on draft papers. This not only enhanced the collaborative
learning environment, it also generally led to better final papers.
I’d like to think that, as this seminar evolved, it became a useful
class both for my students and for me. In my next post, I hope to discuss how
using historical methods can inform our teaching of more "doctrinal classes" – a
version of what others have referred to as “applied legal history.”
