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Citation: 1 Jrslm. Rev. Legal Stud. 96 2010

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HEROES, ANTI-HEROES5 AND VILLAINS

Roy Kreitner*

OPENING REFLECTIONS

LAw s HISTORY by DAVID RABBAN is a book full of content, and content presented with

brilliant and highly m ethodical clarity. There is almost the sense that everything, fromthe theories to the people discussed, is supposed to speak for itself. And still, I'd like

to open this essay by tarrying for a moment with a reflection about form. Anyo ne

leafing through Rabban's book will be struck, I imagine, by its organization around

names. The table of contents is telling: there are, of course, the eleven Americans

who write legal history and thus organize the first chapter; another eleven, with some

repetitions, are mentioned by name in chapter headings of Part I on scholarship in the

late nineteenth century; more names punctuate headings for chapters and 6, and the

chapters on Original American Scholarship are organized individually by authors'

names; eventually, Holmes, Maitland and Pound, receive recognition not only asnames of chapters, but together as the name of Part V of the book. Now, none of

this is accidental, because the main theme of the book as a whole is that these figures

were [at] once central to late nineteenth-century legal academia, but that they are for

the most part nearly forgotten, or at least under-appreciated. Indeed, their sensibility

about law and legal scholarship was in some sense dominant, and yet their actual

historical scholarship is widely neglected.' So in a sense, the very organization or

form presents one of the central riddles of the book, which is ow can those w o were

dominanthave been so quickly)forgotten?

Struck by this centrality of names and the adoption of a largely biographicenterprise, I found myself thinking of Thomas Carlyle's quip that The History of the

World.. .was the Biography of Great Men. Or in slightly less gnomic phraseology:

  Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University. Thanks to David Schorr, Yishai Blank, Shai Lavi, Ron

Harris, and Assaf Likhovski for discussions of the ideas leading up to this essay.'Neglect may even be the benign side of the problem. When the historical scholarship has been

alluded to, it has often, according to Rabban, been derided as unprofessional or belittled as lawyers'

history.

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HEROES, ANTI-HEROES, AND VILLAINS

  Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at

bottom the History of he G reat Men who have worked here.

2

Carlyle published thesethoughts in the year that Holmes was born, 1841, in a book based, like The Common

Law on a series of lectures: On Heroes Hero-Worshipand he Heroic inHistory. This

book has not fared well critically, though it has been reprinted dozens of times. It has

justifiably been read as unabashed, unrepentant romanticism, and the fact that Carlyle

eventually drifted into quite reactionary politics has only added to the contaminating

connection. But there is something in Heroes hat creates a link between the roots of the

historical school and Rabban's book. Enough, actually, that I will dwell eventually on

Heroes Anti-Heroes and Villains Carlyle could easily have identified with the work

of historians who concentrated on custom, on its relation to national character, to thesoil. These are precisely the background conditions, not simply for the emergence of

the hero, but possibly more important, for his recognition and the ensuing hero-worship.

Understanding heroes and hero-worship is good for the soul; indeed, whether or not

we cherish this or that hero, heroes are good company; we learn from them.3 Carlyle

crystallizes the trait of the hero as sincerity or what would in the twentieth century

be refigured as authenticity which may actually be a key to understanding how late

nineteenth-century legal scholars understood the importance of custom. In some ways,

then, Carlyle was Savigny4 for the masses there were extremely strong resemblances

regarding their view of history and the historian, but one crucial difference: Savignyindeed thought of custom as the background source of law, but he was at the same time

quite adamant about explaining and justifying the centrality of professional, scientific

jurists. Once societies had left their primitive, undeveloped states, it was the jurists who

became repositories or bearers of the law, and custom was always filtered through them

 THOM S CARLYLE ON HEROES, HERo-WoRsHIP ND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY 13 1 (Carl Niemeyer

ed., Univ. Nebraska Press, 1966) (1841).3 arlyle waxes poetic:

One comfort is, that Great Men, taken up in any way, are profitable company. We cannotlook, however imperfectly, upon a great man, without gaining something by him. He is the

living light-fountain, which it is good and pleasant to be near. The light which enlightens,which has enlightened the darkness of the world; and this not as a kindled lamp only, but

rather as a natural luminary shining by the gift ofHeaven; a flowing light-fountain, as I say,

of native original insight, of manhood and heroic nobleness; in whose radiance all souls feel

that it is well with them. Id. at 1-2.  Savigny was an immensely influential legal scholar (and later a high official in the Prussian

Ministry of Justice in charge of legislation) who founded the Historical School of Jurisprudence

in early nineteenth-century Germany. For a range of accounts of Savigny s influence, s the

articles in the symposium issue on Savigny in Modern ComparativePerspective 37 AM. J. CoMv

L. 1 (1989).

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98 JRSLM. REV. LEGAL STUD. VOL. 1, 2010

  so expert intermediaries were crucial for Savigny,5 a lesson never adopted by Carlyle,

and perhaps not by some of our American protagonists.These opening reflections lead to two questions, and my aim in the following pages

will be to suggest that Law s istoryoffers us tools for generating a single, unified answer

to both of them. The first question is the relationship between the centrality, or even

dominance, ofhistory in late nineteenth-century American legal thought, on the one hand,

and the widespread misunderstanding or neglect of the historical scholarship produced

by those men cited as central to the historical school. At first glance, this appears to be

a question about the sociology of knowledge: how are schools of thought recognized?

how are reputations made and maintained? what kinds of institutional fixtures supply

centrality in the first place, and what kinds guarantee continuity? But I actually thinksomething a bit different is at stake here, and I will not (though it would have been

informative and possibly useful) go into any of the institutional detail that might have

supplied some guidance so Iwill not ask if not having graduate students, or not founding

the right journals, or not making the right connections with history departments (or

whatever) were factors in the forgetting. Instead I will try to look at something more

internal to the historical school in order to suggest a way to think about this riddle.

Before doing that, I ll mention the other question, which is jurisprudential. It asks

what is distinctive about historical jurisprudence, and what divides late nineteenth-

century legal thought- insofar as it was historical jurisprudence from our own legalconsciousness. Our own legal consciousness of course, is a problematic phrase

that makes a great many assumptions. It implies that there is a we here, that we

have a common legal consciousness. Now, I happen to believe that s right, as far

as American and American-influenced legal academia is concerned. 6 Within that

common consciousness, there is a range oftheories that likely cannot be reconciled, but

legal academics can typically recognize them as different ways of looking at the same

problem. In other words, current legal consciousness is characterized by a recognition

that legal problems are generally open to a plurality of theoretical responses, none of

which enjoy aprioripreferential status, and all of which compete for acceptance. Myguess is that there is a gap between this understanding and that of the late nineteenth

century, and Rabban s book offers some insight in understanding that gap.

  See FRIEDRICH CARL VON SAVIGNY, SYSTEM OF THE MODERN RoMAN L W 67-80 (photo. reprint

1993) (William Holloway trans., Madras, J. Higginbotham Publishers, 1867).  For a wide-ranging view of what modem legal consciousness shares, see generally DUNCAN

KENNEDY A CRITIQUE O DJUDIC TION FWI E SIE LE 1997).

Roy KREITNER

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HEROES, ANTI-HEROES, AND VILLAINS

CENTRALITY AND NEGLECT

Again, how is it that the historians are at once central but neglected? In what seems

like a detour of sorts, I want to try to answer this question, not through the term history,

but rather through the term science. Every description of late nineteenth-century legal

thought runs through science - it is what all the accounts, good or bad, responsible or

reckless, laudatory or contemptuous, all have in common.7 Indeed, the aspiration to

science is often the source from which commentators draw their vision of deductive

reasoning, or of geometric order, of conceptual coherence, and all those other phrases

sometimes associated with science, and often associated with conceptualism or even

formalism. Now, these accounts are not completely baseless, but they are very partial.And one of the great advantages of Law s History lies in fleshing out a significantly

more complex picture, in two important aspects. The first aspect of the complex picture

is that the vision of science held by the historians themselves was quite developed. It

was indeed closely related to the natural sciences, and it was inductive (rather than

deductive), and highly influenced by Bacon. In presenting evidence of these features,

Rabban gives additional depth to the project of portraying a rich and plausible intellectual

pedigree for legal academic production. In particular, Rabban is working alongside

insights presented by Howard Schweber in The Science ofLegal Science: The Model

of the NaturalSciences in Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Legal Education, a piece thatlinks what he calls Protestant Baconianism with a relatively long sweep of influence in

nineteenth-century American sciences generally, including a thick account of Langdell

and Langdell-influenced legal science as pretty thoroughly Baconian (and thus inductive).8

But the second aspect of the complex picture is more important, and it draws

heavily on the transatlantic link to German Legal Science.9 The reason the German

  See, e.g., WILLIAM M. WIECEK THE LOST WORLD OF CLASSICAL LEGAL THoUGHT 89-93 (1998);

Thomas C. Grey, Langdell's Orthodoxy, 45 U. PITT L. REv. 1 5 6 (1983); Christopher Tomlins,Framing he FieldofLaw DisciplinaryEncounters:A HistoricalNarrative,34 LAW Soc y REV

911 (2000).

8 Howard Schweber, The Science ofLegal Science: The Model of the NaturalSciences in

Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican Legal Education,17 LAW HIST. REv. 421 (1999). See also Bruce A.

Kimball, Warn Students That I EntertainHereticalOpinions, Which They areNot to Take as Law

The Inception of Case Method Teaching in the Classrooms of the Early C.C. Langde ll,1870-1883,17 LAW HIST. REv. 57 (1999).

9 For a view of the wider context of borrowing from continental legal thought, see Michele

Graziadei, Changing Images of the Law in nineteenth Century English Legal Thought (The

ContinentalImpulse , in Ti-E RECEPTION OF CONTINENTAL IDEAS IN Ti COMMON LAW WORLD 1820-

1920. at 115 (Mathias Reimann ed.. 1993).

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100 JRSLM. RV. LEGAL STUD. VOL. 1 2010 RoY KREITNER

link is so important is because German Legal Science, beyond the simple fact of being

well-developed and already holding a great dealof

prestige value (which was true alsoof the Baconian pedigree), has a key feature, which is its express reliance on historical

researchas one key to generating scientific validity. However, the historical was only

one key to generating scientific validity: the other was the systemic aspect of legal

science. A fine account of German Legal Science, and one that figures prominently

in Law sHistory is that ofMathias Reimann. 1°Reimann s account draws heavily but

not exclusively on the work of Savigny, and describes German Legal Science as the

synthesis of history and system, gene rating a fusion that was at once positivist, idealist,

and formalist. The positivist dimension meant that legal science had to consider

historical fact, actual legal rules, rather than engage in metaphysical speculation (thiswas its revolt against natural law thinking). The idealist element stemmed from the

view of law as evolving organically. As Reimann puts it: At the core of Savigny's

historical theory of law lay the conviction that the principles were all internally

consistent because they were all part of the same organic whole of one true law for the

entire (cultural) nation. They were all part of the same organic whole because they

were all expressions of the same spirit of the nation. ' This was the revolt against the

other positive law tradition, that ofBentham andAustin who saw law as simply posited

by the sovereign. Finally, it was formalist in a double sense: first, it dealt only with the

abstract determination of the boundaries between individual entitlement holders; andsecond, it employed formal logical method in deducing new rules from the existing

principles within the system. Reimann sums up: Thus, nineteenth century German

legal science was positivist in its focus on historical sources and in its renunciation

of the search for normative standards. It was idealist in its belief that the historically

contingent rules contained timeless principles and in its assumption that in reality

there is reason. And it was formalist in its definition of law that excluded substantive

considerations and in its adherence to deductive logic.' 12

Now, the development of the historical school in Germany doesn't quite stick to

this trajectory. Savigny dies, though he isnot

at all forgotten (indeed, he casts a longshadow). But as the historical school develops, its adherents, still doing German

Legal Science, and still known for their historical jurisprudence, and still holding onto

many of their beliefs regarding organic evolution, stop researching history and spend

0Mathias Reimann, Nineteenth Century Germ an egal Science 31 B.C. L. REv. 837 (1990).

SId. at 886.12 d at 893 94

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HEROES, ANTI-HEROES, AND VILLAINS

all their time on working out the internal consistencies of the system.13 They shift

away from primary historical research, and deeper into the systemic aspect, alongwith its fundamental focus on logical form. It is this heightened attention to logical

form that Max Weber will callformallegal rationality nd it will be crucial in every

twentieth-century understanding of what legal science was all about before it came

under attack all over the West.14

Why all this attention to the intricacies of German Legal Science? Well, the point

is that it is a two-headed monster: history, and system. Now, we can take a step back

and look at the American version of legal science, and we have a chance to combine

Rabban s account, which uncovers in great detail the submerged aspect, the history,

with all the other accounts, which spend so much more energy on logical form. Wha twe come up with is something that actually looks quite familiar, somewhat German,

and a bit less surprising. The historical school, in a sense, dominates, in that it subsumes

what has emerged as legal science. Legal science itself is historical, overall. But it is

also deeply concerned with systemic thought. And this explains why despite the fact

that only four legal academics produce original historical research, the legal science of

the period is in some sense dominatedby an historical outlook. But it also reinstates

the rest of legal academia, the Beales and the Keeners and the W illistons and the host

of others who developed the treatise as the dominant form of legal scholarship and

taught at Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, the Universityof

Pennsylvania, and littleknown places like Yale, and who were overwhelmingly concerned with generating

a systemic view of legal rules, especially in private law. Just like the Germans, the

Americans end up spending more energy on system (in casebooks and systemic

treatises) than on history, while never giving up the view that law is the result of

historical evolution. And this is precisely a recipe for history dominating while the

historians themselves become a neglected breed. It still leaves open the question

of why the systemic becomes so popular. Perhaps oddly, this remains the unasked

question ofRabban s book. Rabban provocatively encourages us to think about why

succeeding generations have tried in various ways to distinguish themselves fromclassical legal thought (i.e., always saying we are all anti-formalistsnow). But the

13 have exaggerated. A more accurate statement would be that German legal scholars put less

emphasis on historical research, and more energy into systemic development. The point remains the

same.

142 MAx WEBER, ECONOMY SocmTY 654-58 (Guenther Roth Claus Wittich eds., Ephraim

Fischoffet. al trans., Univ. Calif. Press, 1978); Duncan Kennedy, The DisenchantmentofLogicallyFormalLegal Rationality orMax Weber sSociology in the Genealogyof the ContemporaryMode of

Western Legal Thought, 55 HAsNos L.J. 1031 (2004).

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102 JRSLM. REV EG L STUD VOL. 1, 2010 RoY KREITNER

opposing question might be just as intriguing: how has the classical structure, along

with its categories andmost

of its basic organizational principles, managed to surviveintact when no one claims to adhere to its underlying assumptions?

HISTORICAL JURISPRUDENCE AND MODERN LEGAL CONSCIOUSNESS

To recall the second question raised above, what makes historical jurisprudence

distinctive, and how does that distinctiveness divide us from the late nineteenth

century? My reading of Rabban's book is that the major difference between us and

our late nineteenth-century academic ancestors touches on the grounds of law, and that

the difference can be localized in the role thatcustom

played in their jurisprudenc e.Kunal Parker and Steven Wilf have both written quite beautifully on this topic, 5

and Law s History provides both many new examples and a slightly different take

on the meaning of custom but for my purposes, I think Parker, Wilf nd Rabban

completely agree: for the historical school as a whole, the emphasis on the role of

custom was a way to express a particular and sophisticated kind of connection to a

very longstanding tradition: a tradition for which law exists as a primary datum. It is

out there. It is not made by conscious individuals. Custom is actually what supplies

law with what we might call the mystical foundation of its authority. Now, by the

late nineteenth century, the process of secularization in the West is well established,meaning that the fact that law was just there, that you would m eet it when examining

society, no longer requires that law be god-given. But it is, in an important sense,

still transcendent even if that word becomes off-limits, or when transcendence is

turned upside down and figured as immanence. This is precisely the idea that the

genuine principles of law inhere in the legal rules, properly understood. And this is

how custom functions as the source of all law (for the custom-oriented members of

the historical school).

One thing that marks Rabban's treatment of the historians as heroes is that he

presents this attitude toward custom direct from the horse s mouth, as it were, withoutthe kind of critical distance that would be all too easy to achieve from the perspective

of modem legal consciousness. There are hosts of examples of this in the book,

but some of the most striking come from the discussion of Christopher Tiedeman's

views on the unwritten constitution whose flexible rules reflect all the changes in

15Steven Wilt, The Invention of Legal Primitivism, 10 THEoREncAL INQUIRI S L. 485 (2009);

Kunal M. Parker, Context in History and Law: Study of the Late Nineteenth-CenturyAmerican

Jurisprudenceo Custom, 24 L W HIST. REv. 73 (2006).

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HEROES, ANTI-HEROES, AND VILLAINS

public opinion, or in Francis Wharton's views that the Civil War amendments m erely

declared as law what was actually an organic change of public sentiment, or though  nominally effected by an amendment to the Constitution, it was really effected by

the spontaneous and instinctive action of the people as a whole... [the amendment]

recorded, and did not create, abolition. It would be easy, from a modem perspective,

to poke holes in these theories, to berate them as confused. But that would be what

Carlyle calls accounting for the hero, b elittling him to the lowest point of his critic,

and but melancholy work. ' 6 Instead, Rabban sets out the historians' thought,

presents it as a school, coherent in outlook ifdivided regarding particular issues), and

in its capacity to re-envision the whole ofAmerican law and thus to make meaning,

as something grand.So the heroic emerges quite clearly. But I think this book also goes further,

touching on anti-heroes and villains, and it is only through them that we can make

sense of the shift to a modem legal consciousness. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and

to some extent Melvin Bigelow in his later work, are the anti-heroes. Anti-heroes

exhibit the qualities of the heroic, but at the same time they sow the seeds of criticism

or introduce the ferrets that will eventually bu rrow under the foundations and bring on

the collapse of the edifice. In true tragic form, they begin careers by pursuing history,

sharing the outlook, appreciating the insights, and partaking of (at least some of) the

pretensions of the historical school, including pursuing original historical research.Eventually, they are lured into a world where law will be conceived otherwise than as

organic evolution, and indeed they will eventually be cited as precursors of the new

vision. The key to that vision is their proto-instrumentalism, the seeds of which would

bear fruit in progressive reform movements early in the twentieth century.

But the figure of the villain is even more interesting, and while Rabban's treatment

is respectful and serious, I think it is pretty clear that the villain is Roscoe Pound. At

first glance, Pound could have been much like Holmes or Bigelow, since he does take

history quite seriously even in his own research. But Pound is the villain because in

the final instance, he denigrates history by historicizing it: Pound makes the historicalschool just another way of looking at law, one outlook among many rather than the

privileged outlook that determines our consciousness. Thus, he takes away the status

of history as the key to the scientific, as the marker of right reason: he is villainous

because he refigures history itself. Pound's modernity, then, lies not simply in the

instrumental focus that of course is crucial, but more than a hint of it was already

  6CARLYE supr note 2, at 12.

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104 JRSLM. REV. LEG L STUD. VOL. 1 2010 RoY KREITNER

present in both Bigelow and Holmes, and truth be told in Ames as well. But the

truly villainous maneuver is positing a modem consciousness that has moved beyondhistorical jurisprudence. His criticism was precisely the type of thing that belittles the

hero, because it posits him as a product of his time.17

Pound s work is organized in

large measure around this maneuver: in various pieces of scholarship with different

points of focus, he constantly returned to the theme that legal thought itself could

be historicized, that it exhibits different characteristics in different places, and that

the historical school was one more part of the past: charismatic law, traditional law,

custom, philosophically derived law, natural law, Austin s positivism, and finally the

historical school (with or without what Pound sometimes claimed was a metaphysical

turn)-

all of these were dominant modes of understanding law at one time, and allof them were giving way.

8The new trope for understanding legal thought was not

limited to instrumentalism, but focused rather on the social The social included

instrumentalism, but also the idea that the interests pursued by law could not be

conceptualized directly through the individual.19

Jhering was of course an important

German influence here, but another transatlantic connection, this time to the French,

 Carlyle was adamant in berating critics for treating heroes as mere products of their time:

I am well aware that in these days Hero-worship, the thing I call Hero-worship, professes

to have gone out, and finally ceased. This, for reasons which it will be worth while some

time to inquire into, is an age that as it were denies the existence of great men; denies the

desirableness of great men. Show our critics a great man, a Luther for example, they begin

to what they call 'account' for him; not to worship him, but take the dimensions of him,  and bring him out to be a little kind of man He was the 'creature of the Time,' they say;

the Time called him forth, the Time did everything, he nothing - but what we the little critic

could have done too. Id18

ROscOE POUND, INTERPRETAIONS OF LEG L HISTORY (1923); RoscoE POUND, AN INTRODUCTION TO

THE PimLosoHY OF LAW (1922).

19A lengthy quotation from Pound serves to indicate how far his view of the law had diverged

from the view developed by the historical school:

For the purpose of understanding the law of today I am content with a picture of satisfyingas much of the whole body of human wants as we may with the least sacrifice. I am content

to think of law as a social institution to satisfy social wants - the claims and demands and

expectations involved in the existence of civilized society - by giving effect to as much as

we may with the least sacrifice, so far as such wants may be satisfied or such claims given

effect by an ordering of human conduct through politically organized society. For present

purposes I am content to see in legal history the record of a continually wider recognizingand satisfying of human wants or claims or desires through social control; a more embracing

and more effective securing of social interests; a continually more complete and effective

elimination ofwaste and precluding of friction in human enjoyment of he goods ofexistence

- in short, a continually more efficacious social engineering.

POUND PHiLosoPHY OF LAW, supra note 18 at 47.

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HEROES, ANTI-HEROES, AND VILLAINS

was just as important. Thinkers like Leon Duguit, Francois Geny, Raymond Saleilles,

and Rene Demogue were articulating, with and before Pound, the idea of the social asa force in some sense a political force) and as a mode of conceptualizing law.20

READING RABBAN

With all that in hand, let me suggest two alternative readings of Law s History. The

first is the reading of Rabban as hero-worshiper, or as a Weberian might put it, a re-

enchanter. Our world has been disenchanted, we understand law instrumentally as an

arena for playing out conflicting interests that can be coldly calculated, even as we

disagree on the measure of calculation or the tools to perform calculations in general.But here, in this school of historical jurisprudence, maybe we have something valuable

that has been lost and might be recovered, if only we were to take seriously the

possibilities, especially the possibilities still visible in modes of spontaneous order.

The second reading is Rabban as genealogist. On this reading, aw s History

explains to us how we got here, what kinds of distortions we needed to undertake

in order to travel this road, what we gave up in getting here, and in particular, how

the historical came to be figured in such a particular way: since Pound, history is

everywhere, but as a background narrative. A declension narrative for conservatives

 once, law was based on custom, government knew its limits, individuals were masters;now, we have bloated government trying to impose social ideals but actually catering

to strong interest groups); or a progress narrative once law was individualistic, now it

has become sensitive to group rights, civil rights, empowerment, overall welfare etc.).

It is a strange polarity, and perhaps the analysis of its emergence is the forerunner to

a new way of figuring history.

20See generallyALFRED FOUILLEE ET. AL. MODERN FRENCH LEGAL P ILosoP Y photo. reprint 1968)

 Mrs. Franklin W. Scott Joseph P. Chamberlain trans., Arthur W. Spencer ed., Boston, Boston Book

Co., 1916); Marie-Clare Belleau, The Juristes nquiets : Legal Classicism andCriticism in Early

Twentieth-CenturyFrance, 1997 UT H L. REv. 379; Duncan Kennedy, Three GlobalizationsofLaw

andLegal Thought: 1850-2000, in ThE NEW LAW AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: A CRTICAL APPRAISAL

19 David M. Trubek Alvaro Santos eds., 2006).

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THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS

SCHOOL OF L W

Public Law and Legal Theory Research Paper Series Number

Reconsidering Law s History: Response

to the Symposium Comments

  Jerusalem Rev. Legal Studies 1 6 2010)

  avidM. Rabban

University of Texas at Austin School of Law

All of the papers in this series are available at

http://ssrn.com/link/texas public law.html

  hispaper can be downloaded without charge from the Social Science Research Network at

http://ssm.com/abstract= 1662425

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  bstract

The first issue of The Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies (pp. 72-136) contains a symposium

on David Rabban s forthcoming book, LAW S HISTORY: LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY

AMERICAN LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP ND THE TRANSATLANTIC TURN TO HISTORY. It includes The

following critical comments

  Adam S. Hofri-Winogradow, Comments on David Rabban s Law s History, 1Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 72 (2010);

  Ron Harris, The Politics of Historical Narratives: Comment on David Rabban s Law s

History, 1Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies 81 (2010);

  AssafLikhovski, Comments on David Rabban s Law s History, 1 Jerusalem Review

of Legal Studies 88 (2010);

  Roy Kreitner, Heroes, Anti-Heroes, and Villains, 1 Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies

96 (2010);

to which Prof. Rabban responds.