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Howard Schweber, David M. Rabban. Law's History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 5, December 2013, Pages 1537–1538, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.5.1537
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Extract
David M. Rabban aims to restore our appreciation for an earlier era of jurisprudence and legal scholarship, the “historical” school of the late nineteenth century. Rabban's study encompasses both the ways in which history was employed in academic writing about law and the particular historiographical lens used by scholars of legal history. The subjects of this book are a dozen or so prominent law professors, whom the author seeks “to understand … on their own terms” (p. 1). Rabban argues that these scholars were more interested in legal history and also better legal historians than modern writers usually realize.
In Rabban's account, during the late nineteenth century legal historiography in America was dominated by an “historical school” that emphasized evolutionary understandings of legal development taking place over a long period of time. The result was a focus on origins dating back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; many of the scholars in this school were devotees of the “Teutonic germ theory” of legal development (pp. 184–186). In addition, these scholars were both inspired by and active participants in the communities of legal historical writers and theorists in Germany and England. Indeed, Rabban notes the significant contributions of American historians to English legal history and, at the same time, the relative paucity of work focusing on American legal history (p. 309). Following the German lead, these writers focused on a Romantic idea of an organic nation, usually equated with race; from that perspective, the development of American law was only the most recent (and hence least interesting) chapter in the story of Anglo-Saxon legal development.
