Legal Theory and Legal History

Maksymilian Del Mar is Reader in Legal Theory at Queen Mary University of London, UK and Michael Lobban is Professor of Legal History at the London School of Economics, UK.

Contents: Introduction. Part I Challenging the Thought of the Present: The common law and legal theory, A.W.B. Simpson; Why is Anglo-American jurisprudence unhistorical?; Morton J. Horwitz; Classification of private law in relation to historical evidence: description, prescription, and conceptual analysis, Stephen 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, John Baker. Part III The Promise of History for Jurisprudence: Toward an integrative jurisprudence: politics, morality, history, Harold J. Berman; Historical jurisprudence, Geoffrey MacCormack; The tasks of historical jurisprudence, Peter Stein; Science, law and history: historical jurisprudence and modern legal theory, Geoffrey Samuel; Critical legal histories, Robert 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, Robert 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. Name index.