During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. "The Transformation of American Law, 1780 1860" (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. "The Transformation of American Law, 1870 1960" (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country s crises.

In this book, Horwitz s students re-examine legal history from America s colonial era to the late twentieth century. They ask classic Horwitzian questions, of how legal doctrine, thought, and practice are shaped by the interests of the powerful, as well as by the ideas of lawyers, politicians, and others. The essays address current questions in legal history, from colonial legal practice to questions of empire, civil rights, and constitutionalism in a democracy. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.

This is a study of marriage litigation (with some reference to sexual offenses) in the archiepiscopal court of York (1300-1500) and the episcopal courts of Ely (1374-1381), Paris (1384-1387), Cambrai (1438-1453), and Brussels (1448-1459). All these courts were, for the most part, correctly applying the late medieval canon law of marriage, but statistical analysis of the cases and results confirms that there were substantial differences both in the types of cases the courts heard and the results they reached. Marriages in England in the later middle ages were often under the control of the parties to the marriage, whereas those in northern France and southern Netherlands were often under the control of the parties' families and social superiors. Within this broad generalization the book brings to light patterns of late medieval men and women manipulating each other and the courts to produce extraordinarily varied results.