I'm delighted to mention that the March 2016 issue of the American Journal of Legal History is up on the web and the hard copy will be arriving in subscribers' mailboxes very soon. This is the inaugural issue with our new publisher, Oxford University Press. From our founding in 1957 through last year the journal was published by Temple University's law school. As part of the re-launch, Stefan Vogenauer and I decided we wanted to hear from a slate of distinguished legal historians about where legal history scholarship is going (or should be going). We asked them to write articles about the "future of legal history." We invited them to write about how they were thinking about the future of legal history. Our authors ended up writing on a huge range, from the methods of analysis to the subjects, to what motivates us to write.
Also this morning at the OUP Blog I have a post about my aspirations for the American Journal of Legal History. The post emphasizes the applied aspects of legal history, but I hope and expect that we'll be publishing terrific scholarship across a broad range of subjects and geographic locations and time periods. Some will speak rather directly, I expect, to contemporary policy; much of the work will be directed at other questions and audiences. I love the illustration the editors chose for the post — the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Close followers of faculty lounge may recall that it was the subject of a trivia question a while back.
The table of contents is as follows:
Editorial
Introducing the Future of Legal History: On Re-launching the American Journal of Legal History, Alfred L. Brophy and Stefan Vogenauer 1
Articles
The Future of Legal History: Roman Law, Ulrike Babusiaux 6
The Future of the History of Medieval Trade Law, Albrecht Cordes 12
Constitutional Meaning and Semantic Instability: Federalists and Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Constitutional Language, Saul Cornell 21
A Context for Legal History, or, This is not your Father’s Contextualism, Justin Desautels-Stein 29
If the Present were the Past, Matthew Dyson 41
For a Renewed History of Lawyers, Jean-Louis Halperin 53
Is it Time for Non-Euro-American Legal History?, Ron Harris 60
A Comparative History of Insurance Law in Europe, Phillip Hellwege 66
Legal History as Political Thought, Roman J. Hoyos 76
Constitution-making in the Shadow of Empire, Daniel J. Hulsebosch 84
First the Streets, Then the Archives, Martha S. Jones 92
The Constitution and Business Regulation in the Progressive Era: Recent Developments and New Opportunities, Paul Kens 97
Expanding Histories of International Law, Martti Koskenniemi 104
Sir Ivor Jennings’ ‘The Conversion of History into Law,’ H. Kumarasingham 113
Federalism Anew, Sara Mayeux and Karen Tani 128
Law, Culture, and History: The State of the Field at the Intersections, Patricia Hagler Minter 139
The Future of Digital Legal History: No Magic, No Silver Bullets, Eric C. Nystrom and David S. Tanenhaus 150
Writing Legal History Then and Now: A Brief Reflection, Kunal M. Parker 168
Beyond Backlash: Conservatism and the Civil Rights Movement, Christopher W. Schmidt 179
Beyond Methodological Eurocentricism: Comparing the Chinese and European Legal Traditions, Taisu Zhang 195
For a limited time the entire issue is ungated. Check out all the articles here.
An auspicious "beginning" if only because there is a recognition and appreciation of "non-Euro-American legal history" in several well-written articles. [And I appreciate the access, as it may be the only chance I get to read the journal.]
When His Majesty King Trump gets anointed, it will all indeed, be History.