As the leading legal historian of his generation in Canada and professor at McGill University for over three decades, Blaine Baker (1952–2018) was known for his unique personality, teaching style, intellectual cosmopolitanism, and deep commitment to the place of Canadian legal history in the curriculum of law faculties. Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History examines important themes in Canadian legal history through the prism of Baker’s career. Essays discuss Baker’s own research, his influence within McGill’s law faculty, his complex personality, and the relationship between the private and the public in the life of a university intellectual at the turn of the twenty-first century. Inspired by topics Baker took up in his own writing, contributors use Baker’s broad interests in legal culture to reflect on fundamental themes across Canadian legal history, including legal education, gender and race, technology, nation building and national identity, criminal law and marginalized populations, and constitutionalism. Law, Life, and the Teaching of Legal History offers a contemporary analysis of Canadian legal history and thoughtfully engages with what it means to honour one individual’s enduring legacy in the study of law.
The trouble with law schools -- The problem with legal history -- Subversive legal history -- The F in feminist legal history -- The perils of periodisation -- Counterfactual legal history -- The parallel world of legal geography -- We are all legal historians now.
A critical history of the Americanization of legal education in fourteen countries The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the export of American power—both hard and soft—throughout the world. What role did US cultural and economic imperialism play in legal education? American Legal Education Abroad offers an unprecedented and surprising picture of the history of legal education in fourteen countries beyond the United States. Each study in this book represents a critical history of the Americanization of legal education, reexamining prevailing narratives of exportation, transplantation, and imperialism. Collectively, these studies challenge the conventional wisdom that American ideas and practices have dominated globally. Editors Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski and their contributors suggest that to understand legal education and to respond thoughtfully to the mounting present-day challenges, it is essential to look beyond a particular region and consider not only the ideas behind legal education but also the broader historical, political, and cultural factors that have shaped them. American Legal Education Abroad begins with an important foundational history by leading Harvard Law School historian Bruce Kimball, who explains the factors that created a transportable American legal model, and the book concludes with reflections from two prominent American law professors, Susan Carle and Bob Gordon, whose observations on recent disruptions within US law schools suggest that their influence within the global order of legal education may soon fall into further decline. This book should be considered an invaluable resource for anyone in the field of law.
How does law come to be stated as substantive rules, and then how does it change? In this collection of discussions from the James S. Carpentier Lectures in legal history and criticism, one of Britain's most acclaimed legal historians S. F. C. Milsom focuses on the development of English common law—the intellectually coherent system of substantive rules that courts bring to bear on the particular facts of individual cases—from which American law was to grow. Milsom discusses the differences between the development of land law and that of other kinds of law and, in the latter case, how procedural changes allowed substantive rules first to be stated and then to be circumvented. He examines the invisibility of early legal change and how adjustment to conditions was hidden behind such things as the changing meaning of words. Milsom points out that legal history may be more prone than other kinds of history to serious anachronism. Nobody ever states his assumptions, and a legal writer, addressing his contemporaries, never provided a glossary to warn future historians against attributing their own meanings to his words and therefore their own assumptions to his world. Formal continuity has enabled nineteenth-century assumptions to be carried back, in some respects as far back as the twelfth century. This book brings together Milsom's efforts to understand the uncomfortable changes that lie beneath that comforting formal surface. Those changes were too large to have been intended by anyone at the time and too slow to be perceived by historians working within the short periods now imposed by historical convention. The law was made not by great men making great decisions but by man-sized men unconcerned with the future and thinking only about their own immediate everyday difficulties. King Henry II, for example, did not intend the changes attributed to him in either land law or criminal law; the draftsman of De Donis did not mean to create the entail; nobody ever dreamed up a fiction with intent to change the law.
This pioneering book is the first to identify the methods, strategies, and personal traits of law professors whose students achieve exceptional learning. Modeling good behavior through clear, exacting standards and meticulous preparation, these instructors know that little things also count--starting on time, learning names, responding to emails.
In the mid-1990s, as public trust in big government was near an all-time low, 80% of Americans told Gallup that they supported the death penalty. Why did people who didn’t trust government to regulate the economy or provide daily services nonetheless believe that it should have the power to put its citizens to death? That question is at the heart of Executing Freedom, a powerful, wide-ranging examination of the place of the death penalty in American culture and how it has changed over the years. Drawing on an array of sources, including congressional hearings and campaign speeches, true crime classics like In Cold Blood, and films like Dead Man Walking, Daniel LaChance shows how attitudes toward the death penalty have reflected broader shifts in Americans’ thinking about the relationship between the individual and the state. Emerging from the height of 1970s disillusion, the simplicity and moral power of the death penalty became a potent symbol for many Americans of what government could do—and LaChance argues, fascinatingly, that it’s the very failure of capital punishment to live up to that mythology that could prove its eventual undoing in the United States.
Professors Michael Hunter Schwartz, Sophie Sparrow, and Gerry Hess, leaders in legal education, have collaborated to offer a second edition of their book. Applying the research on teaching and learning, this book guides new and experienced law teachers through the process of designing and teaching a course. The book addresses how to plan a course, design a syllabus, plan individual class sessions, engage and motivate students, use a variety of teaching techniques, assess student learning, and how to be a life-long learner as a teacher. New chapters focus on creating lasting learning, experiential learning, and troubleshooting common teaching challenges.
This is a contemporary legal history book for Australian law students, written in an engaging style and rich with learning features and illustrations. The writers are a unique combination of talents, bringing together their fields of research and teaching in Australian history, British constitutional history and modern Australian law. The first part provides the social and political contexts for legal history in medieval and early modern England and America, explaining the English law which came to Australia in 1788. This includes: The origins of the common law The growth of the legal profession The making of the Magna Carta The English Civil Wars The Bill of Rights The American War of Independence. The second part examines the development of the law in Australia to the present day, including: The English criminal justice system and convict transportation The role of the Privy Council in 19th century Indigenous Australia in the colonial period The federation movement Constitutional Independence The 1967 Australian referendum and the land rights movement. The comprehensive coverage of several centuries is balanced by a dynamic writing style and tools to guide the student through each chapter including learning outcomes, chapter outlines and discussion points. The historical analysis is brought to life by the use of primary documentary evidence such as charters, statutes, medieval source books and Coke's reports, and a series of historical cameos - focused studies of notable people and issues from King Edward I and Edward Coke to Henry Parkes and Eddie Mabo - and constitutional detours addressing topics such as the separation of powers, judicial review and federalism. A Legal History for Australia is an engaging textbook, cogently written and imaginatively resourced and is supported by a companion website: https://www.bloomsburyonlineresources.com/a-legal-history-for-australia
A study of the experiences of women of color law school faculty and the effect of race and gender on legal education. This book is the first formal, empirical investigation into the law faculty experience using a distinctly intersectional lens, examining both the personal and professional lives of law faculty members. Comparing the professional and personal experiences of women of color professors with white women, white men, and men of color faculty from assistant professor through dean emeritus, Unequal Profession explores how the race and gender of individual legal academics affects not only their individual and collective experience, but also legal education as a whole. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative empirical data, Meera E. Deo reveals how race and gender intersect to create profound implications for women of color law faculty members, presenting unique challenges as well as opportunities to improve educational and professional outcomes in legal education. Deo shares the powerful stories of law faculty who find themselves confronting intersectional discrimination and implicit bias in the form of silencing, mansplaining, and the presumption of incompetence, to name a few. Through hiring, teaching, colleague interaction, and tenure and promotion, Deo brings the experiences of diverse faculty to life and proposes several mechanisms to increase diversity within legal academia and to improve the experience of all faculty members. Praise for Unequal Profession “Fascinating, shocking, and infuriating, Meera Deo’s careful qualitative research exposes the institutional practices and cultural norms that maintain a separate and unequal race-gender order even within the privileged ranks of tenure-track law professors. With riveting quotes from faculty across a range of institutional and social positions, Unequal Profession powerfully reminds us that we must do better. I saw my own career in this book—and you might, too.” —Angela P. Harris, University of California, Davis “A powerful account of inequality in legal academia. Quantitative data and compelling narratives bring to life the challenges and roadblocks in gaining not just entry and tenure but also respect for the voices of minority women within the academy. There are no easy remedies, but reading this book is a good place to start for lawyers and law professors to understand what minority women face and which practices can increase the odds of success.” —Bryant G. Garth, University of California, Irvine “Unequal Profession should be mandatory reading for everyone in legal academia . . . . By providing concrete evidence of systemic discrimination, Meera Deo illuminates a long-standing problem needing to be remedied.” —Sarah Deer, University of Kansas
