Book Reviews : MORTON HOROWITZ, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-19-507024-0, ix + 361 pp., $30.00
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399400300212 |
| Date | 01 June 1994 |
| Published date | 01 June 1994 |
| Author | Jeff Manza |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
312
Saini, Debi S. (1991) ’Compulsory Adjudication of Industrial Disputes: Juridi-
fication of Industrial Relations’, Indian Journal of Industrial Relations 27(1):1-18.
Verma, Pramod (1993) ’Industrial Conflict in India: Some Perspectives for Labour
Judiciary’, in Debi S. Saini (ed.), Labour judiciary, Adjudication and Industrial
Justice. New Delhi: Oxford & IBH.
Woodiwiss, Anthony (1992) ’The Passing of Modernism and Labour Rights: Lessons
from Japan and the United States’, Social &
Legal Studies 1(4): 477-91.
DEBI S. SAINI
Gandhi Labour Institute, Memnagar, Ahmedabad, India
MORTON HOROWITZ, The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of
Legal Orthodoxy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, ISBN
0-19-507024-0, ix + 361 pp., $30.00
Morton Horowitz’s long-awaited sequel to his influential and widely debated The
Transformatzon of Amerzcan Law, 1780-1860 (henceforth Transformation I) charts a very
different direction in the writing of American legal history than the earlier volume. While
Transformatzon I was primarily concerned to develop an ’instrumentalist’ interpretation
of the development of several common law fields from the standpoint of the relationship
of law and legal doctrines to powerful economic actors, Transformatzon II concentrates
on
the history of writings about the law by legal treatise scholars. If the general premise of
Transformatzon I was that changes in the law and legal institutions reflected underlying
economic patterns of development and the articulation of material interests, the new work
implies a close link between legal thought and legal practice.
Transformation II consists of a series of loosely connected essays. A study of the legal
thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes, three chapters on aspects of the legal realist
movement, and one on post-war legal thought are included alongside essays on the theory
of freedom of contract, the nature of the corporation and changing conceptions of
property law. Horowitz stresses one central idea throughout the text: the struggle of
’Classical Legal Thought’ and its contemporary heirs in the so-called ’legal process’ school
to maintain and defend the separation of law and politics, and the struggle of ’Progressive’
legal thinkers from Holmes...
To continue reading
Request your trial