Forthcoming in October, but available for pre-order from Ashgate now, is Legal Theory and Legal History, edited by Maksymilian Del Mar, Queen Mary University of London, and Michael Lobban, London School of Economics. This volume is part a larger series from Ashgate, The Library of Essays in Contemporary Legal Theory (Second Series). Saith the press:
What can legal theorists learn from legal historians? What guidance can historians take from theorists? What theoretical questions underlie legal historical investigations? These are the questions explored and answered by the articles selected in this volume. Taken together, these papers show that the future of historical jurisprudence is a bright one. This is a jurisprudence that can yield insights about how to conceptualise legal change, how to give voice to those operating outside of legal officialdom, and how to understand the relationship between law and politics. The papers selected range from the challenge to legal positivism from the perspective of the history of the common law, to the latest methodological debates in socio-historical jurisprudence. The volume contains a substantive introduction and a detailed bibliography.Contents after the jump.
Introduction
Part I Challenging the Thought of the Present
The common law and legal theory, A.W.B. Simpson
Why is Anglo-American jurisprudence so unhistorical?; Morton Horwitz
Classification of private law in relation to historical evidence: description, prescription and conceptual analysis, S.M. Waddams
Interpretive legal theory and the academic lawyer, Allan Beever and Charles Rickett.
Part II Reconstructing the Thought of the Past
What is legal history a history of, David Ibbetson
Reason in the development of the common law, S.F.C. Milsom
Common law reasoning and the foundations of modern private law, Michael Lobban
The common-law status of colonies and Aboriginal ‘rights’: how lawyers and historians treat the past, P.G. McHugh
Reflections on ‘doing’ legal history, J.H. Baker
Part III The Promise of History for Jurisprudence
Toward an integrative jurisprudence: politics, morality, history, Harold Berman
Historical jurisprudence, Geoffrey MacCormack
The tasks for historical jurisprudence, Peter Stein;
Science, law and history: historical jurisprudence and modern legal theory, Geoffrey Samuel
Critical legal histories, R.W. Gordon
After critical legal history: scope, scale, structure, Christopher Tomlins
Part IV Socio-Historical Jurisprudence
Introduction: J. Willard Hurst and the common law tradition in American legal historiography, R.W. Gordon
Theory and practice in law and history: a prologue to the study of the relationship between law and economy from a socio-historical perspective, David Sugarman
Pigs and positivism, Hendrik Hartog
Law ‘in’ and ‘as’ history: the common law in the American polity, 1790-1900, Kunal M. Parker
How autonomous is law?, Christopher Tomlins.
