Law Commons^™

A Vigil For Thurgood Marshall, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

Three days after his death, on January 27th, Thurgood Marshall came to the Supreme Court, up the marble steps, for the last time. Congress had ordered Abraham Lincoln's catafalque brought to the Court, and on it the casket of Thurgood Marshall lay in state. His beloved Chief, Earl Warren, had been so honored in the Great Hall of the Court, and no one else. Congress made the right decision about the bier, and it spoke with the voice of the people: no other American, of any age, so deserved to lie where Lincoln slept.

To him, all day on Wednesday, …

The Transformation Of Morton Horwitz, Eben Moglen

Faculty Scholarship

In 1977, Morton Horwitz published his astonishing first book, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860. Looking back, two things could be said of the reception of the Transformation: the book was subjected to extremely searching and ultimately quite successful criticism, while at the same time it dominated the field of American legal history for more than a decade, as no book had before, or has since. Like almost all other historians of American law trained in the years following 1977, my education in the craft of legal history was decisively affected by the Transformation. My first published work was a …