A critical catalogue of how lawyers use history - as authority, as evocation of lost golden ages, as a nightmare to escape and as progress towards enlightenment.

Introduction; Part I. The Common Law Tradition in Legal Historiography: 1. The common law tradition in American legal historiography; 2. Holmes' common law as legal and social science; Part II. Legal Historians: 3. James Willard Hurst, against the common law tradition - social-legal history's pioneer; 4. Hurst recaptured; 5. Morton Horwitz and his critics: a conflict of narratives; 6. The elusive transformation; 7. Method and politics: Horwitz on lawyers' uses of history; 8. E. P. Thompson's legacies; 9. Owen Fiss, the constitution of liberal order at the 'Troubled Beginnings of the Modern State'; Part III. History and Historicism in Legal History and Argument: 10. Historicism in legal scholarship; 11. Critical legal histories; 12. The past as authority and social critic; 13. Taming the past: three lectures on history in legal argument; 14. Originalism and nostalgic traditionalism; 15. Undoing historical injustice.

Robert W. Gordon is a Professor of Law at Stanford University, California. He was President of the American Society for Legal History in 2000-2, has served on several bar association committees and task forces devoted to reform of the profession, and has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, Connecticut, Harvard University Massachusetts and the University of Oxford.