American Legal History in Retrospect and Prospect: Reflections on the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of Morton Horwitz's Transformation of American Law

Abstract

Fifteen years ago, a decade after the appearance of his Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, Morton Horwitz was the keynote speaker at the American Society for Legal History's annual meeting in Toronto. His address was an erudite, if idiosyncratic, excavation of the historiography of Anglo-American legal history. The occasion was particularly memorable, however, for the moment when Horwitz offered his interpretation of the scholarship of John Pocock, who as chance inevitably would have it, was at that moment sitting some 20 rows back in the A tremor of disturbance rippled outward from the twentieth row, where Professor Pocock's body language signified a certain disagreement with what he was hearing. Horwitz paused. I am aware of the likely effects of offering an intellectual history of someone who is sitting in the audience. But he didn't stop. This short essay attempts no intellectual history of Morton Horwitz. Others have already pursued that task with accomplishment (see, for example, Ernst 1993). Honoring the spirit of Horwitz's Toronto address, however, my comments will range widely across the terrain of American legal history