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.

Writing about Lord Denning in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Lord Goff wrote that ‘Denning was a great master of the common law….he was one of the greatest and most influential judges ever to sit on the English bench….few would dispute that Denning was the greatest English judge of the twentieth century’. Lord Goff added that Lord Denning ‘taught the English judiciary that the common law cannot stand still [but] must be capable of development on a case by case basis; to ensure that the principles of the common law are apt to do practical justice in a living society’. Fiat Justitia is concerned with Lord Denning’s place in the common law tradition, as defined by Fortescue, Coke and Blackstone. Lord Denning’s approach to the role of the Judge, and the use of judicial discretion, set in the context of the common law tradition, and the assessments of his contemporaries, is evaluated with particular attention being paid to his understanding of precedent, statutory interpretation, individual rights and control of the abuse of power. Lord Denning’s jurisprudence, as an expression of the common law tradition, is also considered in relation to current developments in the law.

A concise examination of the central role of legal decisions in shaping key social issues explores topics ranging from Native American affairs and slavery to business and home life as well as how criminal and civil offenses have been addressed in positive and negative ways. Original.

Documents in American Constitutional and Legal History is a two-volume companion to Urofsky and Finkelman's March of Liberty. This reader provides students with a mix of both frequently cited and lesser-known but equally important historical documents and court decisions that have shaped the nation's constitutional development, beginning with its colonization and extending to the latest decisions of the Supreme Court. Each volume is organised chronologically, and the authors have placing it in its historical context. Each document is also accompanied by a brief list of suggestions for further readings. In addition, the complete text of the U.S. Constitutions is contained in both volumes for easy

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.

In Signposts, Sally E. Hadden and Patricia Hagler Minter have assembled seventeen essays, by both established and rising scholars, that showcase new directions in southern legal history across a wide range of topics, time periods, and locales. The essays will inspire today's scholars to dig even more deeply into the southern legal heritage, in much the same way that David Bodenhamer and James Ely's seminal 1984 work, Ambivalent Legacy, inspired an earlier generation to take up the study of southern legal history. Contributors to Signposts explore a wide range of subjects related to southern constitutional and legal thought, including real and personal property, civil rights, higher education, gender, secession, reapportionment, prohibition, lynching, legal institutions such as the grand jury, and conflicts between bench and bar. A number of the essayists are concerned with transatlantic connections to southern law and with marginalized groups such as women and native peoples. Taken together, the essays in Signposts show us that understanding how law changes over time is essential to understanding the history of the South. Contributors: Alfred L. Brophy, Lisa Lindquist Dorr, Laura F. Edwards, James W. Ely Jr., Tim Alan Garrison, Sally E. Hadden, Roman J. Hoyos, Thomas N. Ingersoll, Jessica K. Lowe, Patricia Hagler Minter, Cynthia Nicoletti, Susan Richbourg Parker, Christopher W. Schmidt, Jennifer M. Spear, Christopher R. Waldrep, Peter Wallenstein, Charles L. Zelden.

No detailed description available for "History and Power in the Study of Law".

The trouble with law schools -- The problem with legal history -- Subversive legal history -- The F in feminist legal history -- The perils of periodisation -- Counterfactual legal history -- The parallel world of legal geography -- We are all legal historians now.

When Lord Denning died in 1999, the leader writer of the Daily Telegraph wrote of ‘a deep and almost tangible ‘Englishness’ which ‘shone through many of Lord Denning’s celebrated judgments. He was patriotic, sceptical and humane; intelligent without being intellectual’. Since 1999, the nature of English identity has become the subject of debate and contention, not only within the academy, but also in politics and the media. In some respects, it could be argued that the debate about English identity is one of the most important in contemporary Britain. The Last of England considers the role of Englishness in the jurisprudence of Lord Denning, setting his conception of the role of the judiciary in the constitution, his views about the nature of history, the land and war, his understanding of equity, in particular the way in which he developed the doctrine of estoppel, his attitudes towards immigration and race and his approach to the law of the European Community in the context of the developing debate about the nature of English identity.

In his book Law and Politics: The House of Lords as a Judicial Body 1800-1976 Robert Stevens wrote that Lord Denning was ‘certainly the most interesting and possibly the most important English judge of the twentieth century’. Stevens also suggested that Lord Denning was one of the ‘few English judges who clearly merits an extensive intellectual biography’. Freedom under the Law essays this task by setting the jurisprudence of Lord Denning in the context of the history of the 1960s and 1970s; assessing his writings about the law and examining his role in the Profumo affair and other major political and legal controversies of that era. Lord Denning’s approach to matters such as religion, education, the currency, the Empire, the Union, national security, the status of aliens and foreigners, social change, the family, the rights of trades unions and the role of the courts in the regulation of industrial conflict and the City of London are examined in the course of a detailed consideration of the judgments which he handed down in the Court of Appeal between 1962 and 1982.