Law in Theory and History - by Maksymilian del Mar & Michael Lobban (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This collection of original essays brings together leading legal historians and theorists to explore the oft-neglected but important relationship between these two disciplines. Legal historians have often been sceptical of theory. The methodology which informs their own work is often said to be an empirical one, of gathering information from the archives and presenting it in a narrative form. The narrative produced by history is often said to be provisional, insofar as further research in the archives might falsify present understandings and demand revisions. On the other side, legal theorists are often dismissive of historical works. History itself seems to many theorists not to offer any jurisprudential insights of use for their projects: at best, history is a repository of data and examples, which may be drawn on by the theorist for her own purposes. The aim of this collection is to invite participants from both sides to ask what lessons legal history can bring to legal theory, and what legal theory can bring to history. What is the theorist to do with the empirical data generated by archival research? What theories should drive the historical enterprise, and what wider lessons can be learned from it? This collection brings together a number of major theorists and legal historians to debate these ideas.

Review Quotes

"... an excellent and thought-provoking book ... a range of considerations and practical difficulties bringing theory and history together are well problematized and explored in a number of chapters. The reader finishes this book with a sense of the potential for interdisciplinary research both between theory and history, and with wider disciplines. One is left with the feeling that interdisciplinary researchers now have some additional material to add to their arsenal, and should feel bolstered in their belief that legal theory and history are excellent bedfellows." --The Journal of Legal History

"This collection of essays provides benefits to legal theorists and legal historians, and choristers and non-choristers, alike. The collection achieves the editors' aim of extolling the virtues of considering the lessons that can be shared between legal theory and legal history." --Edinburgh Law Review

"It is a complex volume and encompasses a number of different understandings of what a renewed rapport between legal theory and history might entail, but its most compelling claim is that there were not two schools of jurisprudence or legal theory in the twentieth-century, but three: as well as positivism and natural law, there was the "historical" school." --The Cambridge Law Journal

"... a fascinating and stimulating collection of papers that ought certainly to remind legal theorists that there is much more to their subject than the standard names that seem to dominate many jurisprudence courses." --Comparative Legal History

"The volume is an important contribution to the topic, which has seen something of a resurgence lately and one from which both legal theorists and legal historians will greatly benefit." --The Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence

"Law in Theory and History offers much to the reader. It addresses issues of significant historical and theoretical interest from a ... variety of perspectives." --Modern Law Review

About the Author

Maksymilian Del Mar is Reader in Legal Theory at Queen Mary University London.
Michael Lobban is Professor of Legal History at the London School of Economics and Political Science.