The U.S. Legal History Survey Revisited: I

This is the start of a series of posts on my first time teaching an introductory legal and constitutional history course. Guest blogger Anders Walker has covered this ground before, and I hope readers continue to benefit from his terrific posts (here). We ought to revisit this topic regularly, as pedagogical methods change, the field shifts, and the appetite for legal history waxes and wanes.

Some of my comments will be specific to teaching legal history in a law school setting, but I hope the conversation will extend to courses taught at the undergraduate and graduate level in history departments. I imagine that my law school course is not in fact so different from an undergraduate level survey. For example, I taught in lecture format and did not assume a strong background in U.S. history. The main differences seem to be the assignments (one final exam/paper as opposed to various projects and shorter papers over the course of the semester) and my operating assumptions about the students' knowledge of legal doctrine and legal institutions.

First, the syllabus. For all you first-time legal history teachers, there are a few great collections of legal history syllabi on the web: check out the links on H-Law, here, and on the Triangle Legal History Seminar's website, here. Anders Walker's syllabus is here, on SSRN. (To those of you who have contributed to these syllabi banks -- thank you!) I also emailed a few legal historians whom I admire, and without fail, they were very generous about sharing with me.

My syllabus is shamelessly derivative of the "Legal History: Law in American Life" course that Sarah Barringer Gordon teaches at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, but I revised a bit to reflect my strengths and interests, as well as to take into account student feedback (e.g., they voted for "Law and the 'War on Terror'" for the final week). I'm sure I will continue to tweak this syllabus, but for the purposes of discussion, here it is:
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