A couple of weeks ago I attended the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History. The meeting was held at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa, one of Canada’s oldest hotels, these days somewhat faded in its elegance. But Ottawa is one of my favorite Canadian cities, and I am always happy to have an excuse to visit. I am also always pleased to go to the ASLH, since legal history is formally my specialty — though not the field in which I do most of my writing these days. I had not been able to attend for several years, since I was serving a term on the Council of the American Philosophical Society which, like the ASLH, meets each year the week before Thanksgiving. I like the ASLH meeting because it is a small group of scholars (about 300 came to Ottawa) with a great many common interests — unlike the American Historical Association, which serves an entire discipline. The papers I heard in Ottawa were excellent, and I was gratified that so many of the best ones were delivered by young scholars.
American legal history, my own specialty, is a fairly new field that has emerged since World War II, and it continues to grow in an exciting way. I was reminded of this in late September, when I traveled to Cambridge for a Festschrift conference in honor of Morton Horwitz, one of the shining lights of the field. Morty and I began working in legal history when we were both fellows at the Harvard Law School in 1969-70. I was then making the switch from colonial political history, and he from political theory. The conference was both a testament to the importance of the Horwitz oeuvre and a demonstration of Morty’s tremendous impact as a teacher of law and graduate students. Such a gathering would have been unimaginable a generation ago.
Apart from a small number of scholars inspired by Willard Hurst at the Wisconsin Law School, there was then not a lot of interest in the history of law in America. But over the past three decades major doctoral training programs have emerged at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Princeton, Virginia, Berkeley, Rice, Michigan and other great universities. There are now several journals and monographic series in the field, which is now commonly taught in both history departments and law schools. I suppose it is fair to say that American legal history is now a field that has come of age, and, as one of the early practitioners, I am enormously pleased by the progress we have made.
But as a commentator on undergraduate curricular matters, I have to feel just a tad ambivalent. For what we have accomplished in legal history has been replicated in numerous other subfields in history. We now have substantial cohorts of scholars with doctoral training in women’s history, Afro-American (and other ethic) history, Atlantic history, queer history, and many other seriously interesting fields. History has always been a house of many mansions, so this is in some sense not new — even when I got my degree in 1961 there were political, military, economic, urban, diplomatic, scientific, Western, and other subfields. But departments then were smaller, doctoral training was less specialized, and history curricula were structured according to broad thematic and chronological themes. Now there is pressure for courses in all these subfields, while many of the traditional fields (political, economic, diplomatic, urban) have been weakened. There is therefore less synthesis in undergraduate teaching, and there are fewer broader historical strokes. This may be good for scholars, and although I have been one of the perpetrators of this dilemma, it worries me. More next time . . .
