Monday, November 10, 2014

Lowe on American Legal History since 1998

Jessica Lowe, University of Virginia School of Law, has posted Radicalism's Legacy: American Legal History Since 1998, which is forthcoming in Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte.  Here is the abstract:
This short essay, commissioned by the German legal history journal Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte, examines developments in American legal history since 1998. Framed around the legacy of Robert Gordon's "Critical Legal Histories," it argues that developments in the field have primarily clustered around five types of inquiry -- legal pluralism, rights consciousness, racial identity, citizenship, and the state -- and that theoretical ideas developed by Gordon and his generation have continued to shape the field. It then examines the unintended pitfalls of the critical agenda, and speculates about new possibilities for the discipline -- and what its relevance might be to the next generation of American law students and law schools.