Russell Sandberg, Subversive Legal History

Russell Sandberg’s Subversive Legal History: A Manifesto for the Future of Legal Education is the first title in Routledge’s Transforming Legal Histories series. This series, aimed at a general legal readership, is designed ‘to encourage law students and scholars to rethink their assumptions about law’ and provide ‘innovative and challenging ways of using history to de-construct and re-construct our understandings of law’ (as explained in the book’s preliminary material). Subversive Legal History is a fitting first book for this series, characterized by an array of diverse and imaginative ideas that cohere around a strongly articulated thesis. Its main argument can be expressed simply. Sandberg argues that there are serious problems with the way in which law is taught in law schools. He also suggests that there are serious problems with the state of legal history, preferring to capitalize the words ‘Legal History’ to emphasize what he argues is the distinct and somewhat insular existence of the discipline. His solution to the second problem—the state of legal history—also provides a solution to the first. By adopting a ‘subversive’ historical approach, we can reinvigorate and transform legal history and integrate new perspectives into the way law is taught to law students. Sandberg claims that this will ‘revolutionise Law Schools’ (p 7). Although the author’s comments about the nature of legal education are focused on the teaching of law in England and Wales, his thoughts on the state of legal history and the importance of a subversive historical approach to legal education are of broad concern. The arguments made in this book have a relevance that reaches far beyond the staffrooms of English and Welsh law schools.

Argument (complex analysis) · Empirical legal studies · Legal Education · Legal history · Legal pluralism · Legal profession · Legal realism · Legal research · Manifesto · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Legal Education and Practice Innovations