Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School, has posted What Lawyers Want from History:
This short essay, written for academic historians, explains how lawyers who argue and decide constitutional cases use history and what they want from history.
Lawyers’ use of history is both normative and prescriptive. They construct a lawyerly version of the past to tell us what we should do in the present. This lawyerly construction of history has three basic features. First, lawyers use history to establish authority for their own arguments and to undermine claims of authority by their opponents. Second, lawyers channel history through standard forms of legal argument that shape what they see in history and what they look for in history. Third, lawyers construct memory. They are memory entrepreneurs who try to get their audiences to remember the past in particular ways.
Lawyers remake history in law’s image and for lawyers’ purposes. They beat history into shape so that they can use it in their quest for authority. To understand the legal uses of history, one must be clear-eyed about what lawyers want from history. Their practices follow their desires.
I found the essay to be quite helpful, when harnessed to Cass Sunstein's Administrative Law's Grand Narrative, in framing a comment for that ASLH panel.
–Dan Ernst
