This is a study of the central role of history in late-nineteenth century American legal thought. In the decades following the Civil War, the founding generation of professional legal scholars in the United States drew from the evolutionary social thought that pervaded Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. Their historical analysis of law as an inductive science rejected deductive theories and supported moderate legal reform, conclusions that challenge conventional accounts of legal formalism Unprecedented in its coverage and its innovative conclusions about major American legal thinkers from the Civil War to the present, the book combines transatlantic intellectual history, legal history, the history of legal thought, historiography, jurisprudence, constitutional theory, and the history of higher education.

Explores the ideological, political, and economic stakes of struggles over international law's history and its relation to empire and capitalism.

A critical catalogue of how lawyers use history - as authority, as evocation of lost golden ages, as a nightmare to escape and as progress towards enlightenment.

This book examines theoretical and practical issues concerning the relationship between international law, time and history. Problems relating to time and history are ever-present in the work of international lawyers, whether understood in terms of the role of historic practice in the doctrine of sources, the application of the principle of inter-temporal law in dispute settlement, or in gaining a coherent insight into the role that was played by international law in past events. But very little has been written about the various different ways in which international lawyers approach or understand the past, and it is with a view to exploring the dynamics of that engagement that this book has been compiled. In its broadest sense, it is possible to identify at least three different ways in which the relationship between international law and (its) history may be conceived. The first is that of a "history of international law" written in narrative form, and mapped out in terms of a teleology of origins, development, progress or renewal. The second is that of "history in international law" and of the role history plays in arguments about law itself (for example in the construction of customary international law). The third way of understanding that relationship is in terms of "international law in history": of understanding how international law has been engaged in the creation of a history that in some senses stands outside the history of international law itself. The essays in this collection make clear that each type of engagement with history and international law interweaves various different types of historical narrative, pointing to the typically multi-layered nature of internationallawyers' engagement with the past and its importance in shaping the present and future of international law.

Since the nineteenth century, the development of international humanitarian law has been marked by complex entanglements of legal theory, historical trauma, criminal prosecution, historiography, and politics. All of these factors have played a role in changing views on the applicability of international law and human-rights ideas to state-organized violence, which in turn have been largely driven by transnational responses to German state crimes. Here, Annette Weinke gives a groundbreaking long-term history of the political, legal and academic debates concerning German state and mass violence in the First World War, during the National Socialist era and the Holocaust, and under the GDR.

Throughout America’s history, our laws have been a reflection of who we are, of what we value, of who has control. They embody our society’s genetic code. In the masterful hands of the subject’s greatest living historian, the story of the evolution of our laws serves to lay bare the deciding struggles over power and justice that have shaped this country from its birth pangs to the present. Law in America is a supreme example of the historian’s art, its brevity a testament to the great elegance and wit of its composition.

Reveals how people thought about, used, manipulated and resisted the law from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, focusing on everyday legal experiences.