This is the time of year when all thoughts turn back to …. school. Legal historians generally do a LOT of school. When others talk of “finishing,” this crowd talks of the long haul. As Bruce Mann once said, this kind of training is not for the faint of heart.
So what draws people – otherwise talented and accomplished people – into legal history? I asked a group of people who are either just about to start graduate school or at an early stage of graduate work (a total of six: three joint degree students, two more doing a history PhD first and then law school, and a third who has completed a JD and is now in the second year of history graduate work). What, I queried, drew you to the field?
Most often, the answers had to do with research. Sometimes it was on the job – going to the NAACP archives to research a case, and finding that the most exciting questions were debated in past generations. Or finding that research in a state archive far from home was more challenging and rewarding than a summer internship in law, even a highly competitive public interest internship.
The joys of research, said this group, made the prospect of all that school less daunting. They knew, in other words, that eventually they would be released back into the world of archive rats, and there they could flourish.
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