Some Observations on a Course in Legal History
RECENTLY a fair amount of talk and even a small amount of action has been noted among law school faculties with respect to the creation of a course or courses in legal history. The following are my thoughts on the purposes of such a course in a law school curriculum and the shape it might take. I shall restrict my discussion to four concerns: the place of legal history in the law school curriculum as a whole; the theoretical and pedagogic approach of a course in legal history; the scope of the course; and the content of the course, with attention to the state of primary and secondary source materials in the selected field. Since I shall argue that at the present time a course or courses in legal history should, absent special considerations, concentrate first on American materials from the nineteenth century, my remarks as regards the last of the above concerns shall be limited to that period.