After Dan Filler’s post, I would like to add a note marking the recent passing of William E. Nelson. I can remember that Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830 (Harvard, 1975) was the first thing that I read from him. Nelson was smart, comprehensive, and filled with cases law in the local courts of the Massachusetts, during the pre-Revolutionary, Revolutionary, and into the early nineteenth century.
The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine was the second of his works that I read, and I taught it two or three times in my seminar. The Legalist Reformation: Law, Politics, and Ideology in New York, 1920–1980 (UNC, 2001) was another outstanding book, offering a powerful account of mid-twentieth-century legal culture and politics in New York, which Nelson loved. His influence is also well reflected in the festschrift edited by Daniel Hulsebosch and R.B. Bernstein, Making Legal History: Essays in Honor of William E. Nelson (NYU, 2013). There were many other important works as well, including his four volume study of the writing and practice of the common law in America from the seventeenth century through roughly 1776.
I admired him very much.