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Seen from Afar: An Outsider's Response to the Hurst Symposium
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2011
Extract
Given the large body of expert writing about Hurst's scholarship in the United States, including the contributions to the present symposium, the most useful course for an outsider seems to me to be to ask a type of Foucauldian question: what is it about the fact of Hurst's writing what he did, at the time he did, that is strange to one foreign to the tradition to which Hurst and his commentators and critics belong? Why was a lawyer in the U.S., so long before legal scholars elsewhere in the Anglophone world, able to see the necessity of conceiving law in context, perhaps moving, as Novak suggests “from constitutional history toward historical sociology”? We can not proceed too abruptly to a conclusion, as if there were a single answer to the question. After all, lawyers such as Hurst, the Legal Realists, and the Supreme Court were involved in the New Deal. By contrast, while the professional social reformer and the professional lawyer might, just, have coexisted in the same British person at this time, the two commitments would have been cordoned off from each other.
- Type
- Commentaries
- Information
- Law and History Review , Volume 18 , Issue 1: Engaging Willard Hurst: A Symposium , Spring 2000 , pp. 181 - 186
- Copyright
- Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2000
References
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