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The Many Meanings Of "Wherefore" In Legal History, Louis E. Wolcher

Washington Law Review

This essay describes the strategies that sometimes allow me to make sense of the answers that people give to the question Why? when it comes up in scholarly accounts of legal outcomes from the past. The essay is constructive, not deconstructive; programmatic, not polemical. I mean to sketch and recommend a way of thinking about legal history that I call methodological self-consciousness. "Methodological individualism" would be both inaccurate and accurate as a label for the essay's approach to questions of causality. The label is inaccurate, because it fails to express the heavy emphasis that I place on the dialectical relationship …