Legal History Commons^™

Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History Of The South, Herbert A. Johnson

Vanderbilt Law Review

This volume of essays generated by a February 1983 conference at the University of Southern Mississippi represents a major step in the advancement of the legal history of the South.' Not only does the collection raise challenging questions concerning the history of law in the South, but it also presents outstanding examples of what can be accomplished when legal historians turn their attention to this region and the states that comprise it. Covering abroad geographical and topical range in individualistic fashion, the essays are, for the most part, well researched and written with clarity and style. This Review will address …

"Legal History" Or The History Of Law: A Primer On Bringing The Law's Past Into The Present, Stephen B. Presser

Vanderbilt Law Review

The increasing opportunities to teach legal history in law schools and the lamentable decline of positions available to historians in undergraduate institutions have resulted in more historians either teaching in law schools or combining graduate training in history with graduate training in law. As a result, several methodologies or approaches to legal history have emerged. Although legal history has generated a great deal of comment, few have written about how this spate of scholarship and criticism might affect law school teaching. This Article attempts to categorize and to review,therefore, the kinds of insights that American legal history currently offers both …

Essays On Problems And Prospects In Southern Legal History, Kermit L. Hall

Vanderbilt Law Review

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once urged historians to study the law because it offered a magic mirror whose reflections divulged fundamental social values.' Holmes' plea on behalf of the utility of legal history has relevance for southerners intrigued by the possibility of their historical distinctiveness. Without a basis of comparison, however, the search for southern exceptionality becomes a quest after the arcane. As C. Vann Woodward observed,southern history ought to tell all Americans, not southerners alone,something about their common pasts. Woodward argued that attaining this goal was entirely feasible, since certain aspects of the southern past, such as slavery …

Reason Of Slavery: Understanding The Judicial Role In The Peculiar Institution (Part One), Robert B. Jones

Vanderbilt Law Review

This brief survey has superficially touched upon the most prominent works of the historiography of slavery and has ignored the large mass of work on subjects such as slavery in the various states, slave rebellions, slave reminiscences, and the anti-slavery crusade. With the exception of the Civil War, perhaps more has been written about slavery than any other aspect of southern history. Despite the great amount of scholarship devoted to the study of slavery, however, there has been, as Keir Nash points out, little scholarly work done on the legal history of slavery. One hopes this gap will be bridged …

Reason Of Slavery: Understanding The Judicial Role In The Peculiar Institution, A. E. Keir Nash

Vanderbilt Law Review

The results most relevant to the concerns of this Article are of course the effects upon how we judge the judges-for almost always we are sufficiently Whiggish to attempt such a judgment, either explicitly or implicitly. At times the consequence of so summing can be to imagine that one catches the judicial conscience by asking questions phrased as Sentence D's query, whether the judges"collaborated" in a system of racial oppression. When we put the question this way, two unfortunate things happen. First, we create a verbal and historical muddle, for if anything ought to be clear by now it is …

St. George Tucker, John Marshall,And Constitutionalism In The Post-Revolutionary South, Charles T. Cullen

Vanderbilt Law Review

A study of Marshall's early career suggests several reasons for constitutionalism fundamentally different from that of Tucker, a constitutionalism that became law in the early Republic because of Marshall's position on the Supreme Court. The writings and careers of southern constitutionalists like Tucker also merit further study in order to fully appreciate the growing divergence between the views originally expressed by him and those embraced by the nationalists, who decreased in number in the South after Marshall's time. Finally, we should develop a better understanding of the influence of southerners on the formation of legal and constitutional systems in other …

Judicial Impeachments And The Struggle For Democracy In South Carolina, James W. Ely, Jr.

Vanderbilt Law Review

Judicial tenure had become a sensitive issue in the colonies before the American Revolution. Although the Act of Settlement of 1701 guaranteed tenure during good behavior for judges in England, this statute did not extend to the colonies, and royal governors regularly were instructed to issue judicial commissions at the pleasure of the Crown. Judges in New York briefly secured appointments for good behavior during the 1750's, but in 1761 the King in Council directed that henceforth no commission could be granted except at pleasure. In 1759 the Pennsylvania Assembly passed a measure providing that judges in that colony would …

The Early Legal Career Of Howell Jackson, Terry Calvani

Vanderbilt Law Review

Felix Frankfurter observed in 1937 that "American legal history has done very little to rescue the [United States Supreme] Court from the limbo of impersonality."' Subsequently, numerous individual and collective works have focused on the more prominent figures in the history of that institution.' Unfortunately, there remain many justices of the Supreme Court who have received relatively little scholarly attention. Yet, as one political scientist has recently lamented, "[until] there is a fuller awareness of the inter-play between individual personalities and decision making, it is unlikely there will be 'an adequate history of the Supreme Court."

One such individual is …

Book Reviews, Donald P. Kommers, I. C. Rand

Vanderbilt Law Review

Law and Social Process in United States History:

The excellence of Law and Social Process in United States History in every respect matches the high honor accorded Professor Hurst when invited to deliver the ninth series of the Thomas M. Cooley Lectures under the sponsorship of the University of Michigan Law School. This volume, following upon the heels of his Growth of American Law and Law and the Conditions of Freedom, the latter having won the James Barr Ames prize granted quadrennially by the Harvard Law School, merely affirms his stature as an eminent legal historian. Like the earlier volumes, …

Book Notes, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

Conservation of Oil and Gas, A Legal History, 1948

Edited by Blakely M. Murphy

Chicago: American Bar Association, 1949. Pp. xvii, 754. $3.00

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1950 Annual Survey of American Law

New York University School of Law

New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1951. Pp. x, 915. $10.00

Book Reviews, Stanley D. Rose (Reviewer), Charles C. Trabue, Jr. (Reviewer)

Vanderbilt Law Review

READINGS IN AMERICAN LEGAL HISTORY

Compiled and edited by Mark DeWolfe Howe

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. Pp. 529.$7.50

reviewer: STANLEY D. ROSE

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THE GROWTH OF AMERICAN LAW: THE LAW MAKERS

By James Willard Hurst

Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1950. Pp. xiii, 502. $5.50

reviewer: STANLEY D. ROSE

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REASON AND LAW

By Morris R. Cohen

Illinois: The Free Press, 1950. Pp.211. $3.50

reviewer: STANLEY D. ROSE

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AN INTRODUCTION TO LEGAL REASONING

By Edward H. Levi

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949. Pp. 74. $2.00

reviewer: STANLEY D. ROSE

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LIVING LAW OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY

By …