Rabban on the Historical School of American Jurisprudence

[Here is the latest in a series of posts by David Rabban, Texas Law.]

In my last two posts about my new book, Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I focused on the original scholarship on the history of English law by five late nineteenth-century Americans: Henry Adams, Melville Bigelow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., James Barr Ames, and James Bradley Thayer. Their internationally respected work provided a fascinating intellectual link between the two great nineteenth-century English legal historians, Henry Maine and Frederic Maitland. In this post, I emphasize that the turn to history in late nineteenth-century American legal scholarship was not limited to the relatively few who became legal historians. During this period, American legal scholars generally viewed history as the key to legal analysis. They often identified their historical approach to law as a distinctive jurisprudential school. Among the most eminent of these scholars were James Coolidge Carter, Thomas McIntyre Cooley, William Gardiner Hammond, John Norton Pomeroy, Christopher G. Tiedeman, and Francis Wharton. Demonstrating the existence and analyzing the characteristics of this “historical school of American jurisprudence” are major goals of my book.

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