First Page
849
Abstract
The increasing opportunities to teach legal history in law schools and the lamentable decline of positions available to historians in undergraduate institutions have resulted in more historians either teaching in law schools or combining graduate training in history with graduate training in law. As a result, several methodologies or approaches to legal history have emerged. Although legal history has generated a great deal of comment, few have written about how this spate of scholarship and criticism might affect law school teaching. This Article attempts to categorize and to review,therefore, the kinds of insights that American legal history currently offers both to law students and to law professors. Parts II and III of the Article sketch the parameters of the legal history discipline and describe the variant historiographical approaches that scholars recently have adopted. Part IV then offers some suggestions for integrating legal history into selected law school courses.
Recommended Citation
Stephen B. Presser,
"Legal History" or the History of Law: A Primer on Bringing the Law's Past into the Present,
35 Vanderbilt Law Review
849
(1982)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlr/vol35/iss4/2