Horwitz - Böcker

This anthology will offer a set of readings in Legal Realism, the most influential movement in American legal history, and one which more than fifty years later remains the subject of lively debate. Realist essays and reviews, written chiefly between 1900 and 1940, are difficult to obtain. The anthology will for the first time make a wide range of Realist work generally available. The forty selections of Realist writing will be preceeded by a general introduction by the three editors one of whom (Mort Horwitz) is considered one of the preeminent scholars writing on this subject. Headnotes to the selections will provide a concise biographical note for each essayist and an explanation of the legal and political issues at stake in the selections. The anthology will also make available for the first time a comprehensive annotated bibliography which should be very valuable to an interdisciplinary group of scholars.Readings include selections from the writings of Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Thayer, Roscoe Pound, John Chipman Gray, Wesley Hohfeld, Karl Llewellyn, Arthur Corbin, Nathan Isaacs, Lon Fuller, Robert Hale, Morris Cohen, Louis Jaffe, Jerome Frank, John Dewey, James Landis, Harold Laski, Benjamin Cardozo, Max Radin, Louis Brandeis and others.

Morton Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 won the Bancroft Prize in American History in 1978 and is considered one of the most significant books ever published in American legal history. A paperback edition is widely used in undergraduate American history courses and legal history courses in law schools. Legal scholars and historians eagerly await Horwitz's sequel for the modern period which he is now submitting for our consideration. Horwitz's first volume considered the economic conflicts underlying the transformation of American law in the antebellum period. He sought to show how the resolution of conflict through legal rather than political channels led emerging entrepreneurial and commercial groups to win a disproportionate share of wealth and power in American society. His sequel traces the ongoing contest between orthodox and critical movements in American law and their impact on the American legal and political system. Horwitz considers American legal thought and practice in a broad intellectual context, noting the profound impact of positivist and humanist thinking on legal ideology.