The Docket 1:3: A Tribute to Robert W. Gordon

The Docket 1:3 (October 2018), A Tribute to the Scholarship of Robert W. Gordon, is now online.  As the editor explains:

On January 12, 2018, on a Friday afternoon in Palo Alto, California, a number of the United States’ leading legal historians converged on Stanford Law School to discuss a major new work, Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law. They also traveled from throughout the country to celebrate the book’s author, Professor Robert W. Gordon, Professor of Law at Stanford University, and previously the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale Law School. The proceedings that followed discussed Gordon’s broad contributions to three areas of inquiry: the common law tradition, legal history, and critical legal historicism—tracking closely to the organization of Gordon’s book. The formal arguments and scholarly claims about Gordon’s book were so significant that they merited publication as a series of ten comprehensive pieces in volume 70, issue 5 of the Stanford Law Review.

But word quickly spread, particularly among the community of American legal historians, that neither the intellectual richness nor the spirit of the event (collectively dubbed ‘Bobfest’ by attendees) could be fully captured in a series of traditional articles. So we were thrilled when Professors Ariela Gross of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law and Susanna Blumenthal of the University of Minnesota Law School, who had organized ‘Bobfest,’ asked if we would be interested in publishing a special issue of The Docket to capture the conversations that occurred during the proceedings. Of course, we jumped at the chance.