Judicial History

Catalog description

This course will examine the question of what history has to teach us about law through a close reading of two short books, Grant Gilmore's The Ages of American Law and Judge John Noonan's Persons and Masks of the Law. Gilmore's approach is to sketch out broad tendencies in American legal thought and practice and relate them to the broader historical context; Noonan's is to focus on the individuals who were involved in specific legal disputes—parties, advocates, judges—and examine how the ways in which law shapes, and misshapes, our understanding of those disputes.