Making Legal History
Approaches and Methodologies

The first book to address the way that the broad and inclusive subject of legal history is researched and written.

Anthony Musson (Edited by), Chantal Stebbings (Edited by)

9781107014497, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 January 2012

330 pages, 8 b/w illus.
23.1 x 16 x 2 cm, 0.61 kg

'This book is highly important.' Adelyn L. M. Wilson, Comparative Legal History

Drawing together leading legal historians from a range of jurisdictions and cultures, this collection of essays addresses the fundamental methodological underpinning of legal history research. Via a broad chronological span and a wide range of topics, the contributors explore the approaches, methods and sources that together form the basis of their research and shed light on the complexities of researching into the history of the law. By exploring the challenges posed by visual, unwritten and quasi-legal sources, the difficulties posed by traditional archival material and the novelty of exploring the development of legal culture and comparative perspectives, the book reveals the richness and dynamism of legal history research.

Introduction Anthony Musson and Chantal Stebbings
Foreword: reflections on 'doing' legal history Sir John Baker
1. Editing law reports and doing legal history: compatible or incompatible projects Paul Brand
2. The indispensability of manuscript case notes to eighteenth-century barristers and judges James Oldham
3. Judging the judges: the reputations of nineteenth century judges and their sources Patrick Polden
4. Benefits and barriers: the making of Victorian legal history Chantal Stebbings
5. The historical turn in late nineteenth-century American legal thought David M. Rabban
6. The methodological debates in German speaking Europe (1960–90) Marcel Senn
7. Exploring the minds of lawyers: the duty of the legal historian to write the books of non-written law Dirk Heirbaut
8. Comparative legal history: a methodology David Ibbetson
9. 'They put to the torture all the ancient monuments': reflections on making eighteenth-century Irish legal history Sean Donlan
10. The politics of historiography and the taxonomies of the colonial past: law, history and the tribes Paul McHugh
11. Lay legal history Wilf Prest
12. Antiquarianism and legal history Michael Stuckey
13. Re-examining King John and Magna Carta: reflections on reasons, methodology and methods Jane Frecknall-Hughes
14. Visual sources: mirror of justice or 'through a glass darkly'? Anthony Musson
15. Sanctity, superstition and the death of Sarah Jacob Richard Ireland.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Comparative law [LAM], Law [L]