Law as politics
Horwitz on American law, 1870–1960
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6252160 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard A Posner (United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1992 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 559-574 |
| Publication date | 1992-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Critical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0891-3811 • E-ISSN: 1933-8007 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/08913819208443279 |
| OpenAlex | W2006933449 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
The long‐awaited second volume of Morton Horwitz's history of American legal thought covers the period 1870 to 1960. The focus is on academic law. Horwitz's thesis is that every generation rebels against the existing conceptual structure of law, but then establishes its own equally formalistic structure to replace it. The cycle can be broken only if the essentially political character of law is faced up to squarely. Unfortunately, Horwitz has attempted to reduce a century of American legal history to an academic debate over formalism, which, in turn, he reduces to the personal idiosyncrasies of some of the participants. However, the book also contains a valuable, close‐grained intellectual history of the legal profession's struggle to adapt legal categories to changed social and economic conditions
Character (mathematics · Formalism (music · Legal history · Legal profession · Legal realism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law
| Highly cited | No |
|---|