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 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.

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.

This interdisciplinary exploration of the modern historiography of international law invites a diverse assessment of the indissoluble unity of the old and the new in the most global of all legal disciplines. The study of the history of international law does not only serve a better understanding of how international law has evolved to become what it is and what it is not. Its histories, which rethink the past in the present, also influence our perception of contemporary matters in international law and our understandings of how they may potentially unfold. This multi-perspectival enquiry into the dominant modes of international legal history and its fundamental debates may also help students of both international law and history to identify the historical approaches that best suit their international legal-historical perspectives and best address their historical and legal research questions.

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

According to Anthony Chase, American law has undergone a series of radial transformations that correspond to four broad periods of American history: precapitalist, capitalist, state capitalist, and global capitalist. Laws may be written down in black and white, but as economic and social history unfold, Chase argues, the spirit of the law slips quietly from the letter, leaving room for interpretation. This gray space is where legal analysis and debate take place - and legal institutions develop. Drawing on an impressive range of sources - from classic texts by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, to Norman Mailer lectures and the critical legal studies theory of Morton Horwitz - Law and History explores what the author calls "the intriguing mystery of how law and history fit together." How precisely have long-term economic cycles influenced American legal doctrine? How have movements in U.S. social history shaped the development of our legal institutions?