Legal History as Political Thought

Abstract

What do we want from legal history? What do we want it to be? What do we want it to do? These questions are not always at the fore of our minds in our scholarship. But they are implicit in the topics we choose to study and the ways in which we study them. This is true of my work. As I began to think about the future of legal history, I realized that I had been thinking about these questions for a long time, and increasingly intensely. And so I want to use my own work to hint to the possibilities of legal history’s future. By work I do not mean only my written work, but more broadly my engagement with legal history. This means my writing, reading, discussions, reflections, and teaching. This means engagement with anonymous reviewers, colleagues (as teacher and student), authors whom I’ve never met, editors, lawyers, administrators, students, and friends and lay folk, both inside and outside of the academy. My training as an historian has informed my interactions with all these people in myriad ways, often unrelated specifically to history. By hint I mean examining what legal history in the future might look like. My aim here is not to prescribe. Nor is it to outline or roadmap a future. However important and useful such techniques are, my aim is to open possibilities, not to limit them. All I want to do is to speculate. Rather than attempt to direct what may come, I want to cajole legal historians simply to think about the future that is imminent in their work by thinking out loud about my own. I want to bring to the fore of my mind some things that have been rattling around in the back of it, in the hope that those things matter.