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.

One of the academy's leading legal historians, William E. Nelson is the Edward Weinfeld Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. For more than four decades, Nelson has produced some of the most original and creative work on American constitutional and legal history. His prize-winning books have blazed new trails for historians with their substantive arguments and the scope and depth of Nelson's exploration of primary sources. Nelson was the first legal scholar to use early American county court records as sources of legal and social history, and his work (on legal history in England, colonial America, and New York) has been a model for generations of legal historians. This book collects ten essays exemplifying and explaining the process of identifying and interpreting archival sources--the foundation of an array of methods of writing American legal history. The essays presented here span the full range of American history from the colonial era to the 1980s.Each historian has either identified a body of sources not previously explored or devised a new method of interrogating sources already known.The result is a kaleidoscopic examination of the historian's task and of the research methods and interpretative strategies that characterize the rich, complex field of American constitutional and legal history. Daniel J. Hulsebosch is Charles Seligson Professor of Law and Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830. R. B. Bernstein is Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law at New York Law School and Adjunct Professor of Political Science in the Skadden, Arps Honors Program in Legal Studies at the City College of New York.He has written, edited, or co-edited over 20 books in the fields of American constitutional and legal history, including the prize-winning The Founding Fathers Reconsidered and Thomas Jefferson.

In his paradigm-shifting analysis, Daniel J. Hulsebosch captures the essential paradox at the heart of American constitutional history: the Revolution, which brought political independence and substituted the people for the British crown as the source of legitimate authority, also led to the establishment of newly powerful constitutions and a new postcolonial genre of constitutional law that would have been the envy of the British imperial agents who had struggled to govern the colonies before the Revolution.The revolutionary transformation did not, therefore, consist of a new conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state, Hulsebosch argues. Instead, it entailed a search for new ways of framing, empowering, and limiting official power. Hulsebosch demonstrates that these constitutional experiments were informed by imperial experience and continued well into the nineteenth century, as New York moved from the periphery of the British Atlantic empire to the center of a new continental empire.