Transformations in American Legal History ─ Law, Ideology, and Methods -- Essays in Honor of Morton J. Horwitz

Transformations in American Legal History—Law, Ideology, and Methods is the second of two volumes of essays by Morton J. Horwitz's students, colleagues, and friends. The essays are inspired by Horwitz's extensive interests, ranging from colonial America to civil rights in the twentieth century, Israel's connections to American law, and the methods of legal history.

During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960 (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country's crises. His current work, on the Warren Court for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court is disclosing the multiple ways that the Supreme Court influenced—and was influenced by—American culture in the 1950s and 1960s and how the Supreme Court related to the revolution in society and politics that changed so dramatically our nation.

In this book, Horwitz's colleagues, friends, and students re-examine legal history from America's colonial era to the late twentieth century. They ask classic Horwitzian questions, of how legal doctrine, thought, and practice are shaped by the interests of the powerful, as well as by the ideas of lawyers, politicians, and others. The essays address current questions in legal history, from early American legal experience to questions of empire, civil rights, and constitutionalism in a democracy. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American regal history.

Daniel W. Hamilton is professor of law at the University of Illinois College of Law, and co-director of the Illinois Legal History Program. He is the author of The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy in the Civil War. His work examines property ideology and constitutional history in the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Alfred L. Brophy is the Reef C. Ivey II professor of law at the University of North Carolina. He is the author of Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 192 I –Race, Reparations, Reconciliation and Reparations Pro and Con, and he is completing a study of jurisprudence in the old South, tentatively titled "University, Court, and Slave."