Legal History or the History of Law: A Primer on Bringing the Law\u27s Past into the Present

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

The Ordinary, the Exceptional, the Corrupt, and the Moral: What Did the Impeachment of Bill Clinton Mean for America and Americans? Book Review Of: An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton. by Richard A. Posner

Book review of: An Affair of State: The Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of President Clinton. By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press. 1999. Pp. 266. Reviewed by: Stephen B. Presse

Samuel Chase: In Defense of the Rule of Law and Against the Jeffersonians

Samuel Chase is not exactly unknown. Indeed, as the only U.S. Supreme Court Justice to be impeached, he achieved a sort of instant fame, or instant infamy. He is, I think, fairly characterized as a neglected Justice, however, because, in our exclusive focus on his impeachment, we tend to forget that he did possess considerable intelligence, virtue, legal ability, and energy that make him worth our study. His life is also something of an object lesson in how a judge\u27s self-destructive tendencies can harm his reputation. As Richard Peters, his colleague on the Pennsylvania Circuit Court remarked, Chase had a singular instinct for tumult and appeared to have sought controversy whenever he could. I never sat with him without pain, Peters remembered, as he was forever getting into some intemperate and unnecessary squabble. \u27 Chase is remembered as a rabid Federalist partisan and a vehemently anti-Jeffersonian judge. I am not aware of any other Supreme Court Justice who apparently deprived his Court of a full complement of required personnel because he went out on the political hustings to give speeches in support of a presidential candidate he favored (John Adams) and against one he feared (Thomas Jefferson). During the 1800 election campaign, Chase made himself an easy target for Jeffersonian newspapers when he appeared to sympathize zealously with the prosecution of Jeffersonian editors and writers. Indeed, more than one historian has suggested that in the trial of one of these writers, the notorious John Thompson Callender, Chase actively sought to prevent all creatures called democrats from serving on the jury. This assertion, however, is dubious

Book Review: to Secure These Rights: The Declaration of Independence and Constitutional Interpretation. by Scott Douglas Gerber.

Book review: To Secure These Rights: The Declaration of Independence and Constitutional Interpretation. By Scott Douglas Gerber. New York and London: New York University Press. 1995. Pp. 315. Reviewed by: Stephen B. Presser

Book Review: The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth. by William R. Casto.

Book review: The Supreme Court in the Early Republic: The Chief Justiceships of John Jay and Oliver Ellsworth. By William R. Casto. Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xvi, 267. Reviewed by: Stephen B. Presser