Monday, March 5, 2012

legal history teaching materials

Someone who commented on my previous post asked for the reading list for the course I'm teaching on law, labor, and capitalism. I linked to it back in January -- you can find the post in which I linked to it here.

In addition to the reading list, I've uploaded two more items (both PDF). The first here is slides from a lecture I gave on the history of police in American history (inspired by Christopher Tomlins' research on the subject), titled "'F*ck tha Police'? Law, Institutional Change, and the American Revolution". The second here is a lecture on the relative autonomy thesis as applied in Morton Horwitz's brilliant Transformation in American Law, 1780-1860. The title of that one is much less interesting: "Relative Autonomy and Historical Materialism in Horwitz's Transformation in American Law".

Just a brief note: the field of legal history is ripe for economists' picking. It is indeed due time to revive the idea of a "law and economics for the left", or a "radical law and economics", or maybe simply, "heterodox law and economics", something in the spirit of the early 20th century Commons-esque old institutionalism, but updated with a more interdisciplinary and stronger theoretical outlook. I humbly consider my dissertation as one step in that direction -- we'll see where that goes.

More on these issues when I get around to getting them out of my head and putting them down somewhere.

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