Law in Early America

Abstract

Gerard W. Gawalt. The Promise of Power: The Emergence of the Legal Profession in Massachusetts, 1760-1840. West port, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979. 254 + x pp. Leo Herskowitz and Milton M. Klein, eds. Courts and Law in Early New York: Selected Essays. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennicat Press, 1978. 155 pp. Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau. Federal Courts in the Early Republic: Kentucky 1789-1816. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 234+ ix pp. Until a generation ago most American legal history had preoccupations appropriate to its close association with the curriculum of law schools. Pro- fessional legal history was the chronicling of substantive changes in the law, the discovery of arcane legal precedent, the criticism on historicist grounds of presumed analogies, the institutional history of judicial procedures and responsibilities, and the analysis of constitutional doctrine. Legal historians usually discouraged other historians from taking an interest in these studies, but fell into two camps in doing so. Some advised that legal history was too anachronistically whiggish and too professionally antiquarian to be of much importance to "real" historians; others warned historians, as laymen, to have decent and prudent modesty and not to venture onto professional turf.