The Appellate Opinion as Historical Source Material
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3514350 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gillian E White (0000-0002-7584-7295, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1971 |
| Volume | 1 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 491 |
| Publication date | 1971-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/202624 |
| OpenAlex | W2323982475 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
The Appellate Opinion as Historical Source Material American legal history has recently piqued the curiosity of historians and legal scholars seeking to make connections between their respective disciplines. Underlying this interest is the assumption that the working materials of the legal profession-cases, statutes, treatises, and the like-reflect to some degree the changing patterns of American civilization and may fruitfully be viewed as indices of the general tone of American culture at various points in time. This assumption may seem hardly worth lingering over, especially to historians accustomed to noting the ways in which institutions and ideas in America have taken on distinctive forms during particular time periods. Yet the inclusion of appellate court decisions in the general category of materials considered representative of the style and substance of intellectual contributions at a given point in American history raises a number of troublesome problems in interdisciplinary communication. I am concerned here with identifying some of those problems and with proposing one methodological approach designed to alleviate them. Specifically, my focus is on the factors that distinguish appellate opinions from the general mass of recorded social phenomena available to the historian, the relationship between these factors and the development in the legal profession of a particular set of techniques for analyzing material, and some of the implications of this development for the potential scholar in legal history. By focusing upon some of the problems in a historical treatment of appellate court decisions, I am, of course, eschewing the rather ordinary matter of legal history, which Hurst has found so stimulating for what he calls issues of high politics.I This is not to suggest that appellate decision-making should necessarily be the central concern of legal historians. My emphasis upon appellate decisions stems primarily from the fact that they have traditionally been the core materials of legal education in America-the practice field, as it were, on which a set of
Expert opinion · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Legal Education and Practice Innovations · Medicine
| Citations per year | 0.16 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1977 - 2009 (33) |
| Highly cited | No |