Felix Cohen Was the Blackstone of Federal Indian Law:' Taking the Comparison Seriously

AuthorAdrien Habermacher
PositionAssistant Professor of Law, Université de Moncton (NB, Canada). D.C.L. candidate, McGill University
Pages371-398




This paper explores the many facets of Rennard Strickland’s comparison between Sir
William Blackstone, author of the 1765-69 Commentaries on the Laws of England,
and Felix Cohen, architect of the 1942 Handbook of Federal Indian Law. It consists
of a side by side analysis of both authors’ master works, political and educational
projects, as well as general contribution to jurisprudence. It reveals that despite the
         
professorship at Oxford in the late eighteenth century, and Cohen’s endeavors on
the US federal law concerning Native Americans as a civil servant at the turn of
the 1940s, there are remarkable similarities in the enterprises of legal scholarship
the two jurists took on, the larger political projects they promoted, and their role in
the development of legal thought. The idea that “Felix Cohen was the Blackstone
of Federal Indian Law” has stylistic appeal and could have been little more than
a gracious way to celebrate Cohen. An in-depth comparative examination of legal
   
comparison.

Legal History, Jurisprudence, Comparative Law, Native American Law, Legal
Education


© 2019 Adrien Habermacher, published by Sciendo.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
          
       





A. The Nature and Characteristics of the Work: Historical Analysis,
Agreeable Style, and Organization of a Mass of Rules into a System of
Legal Principles ................................................................................
8 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2019)
B. Reception and Jurisprudential Impact: Leading Sources of Law with
 .........................


A. The Nature of the Projects: Proposals for the Role of Law and Legal
Education in Social Relations ...........................................................
B. The Extent of Their Achievements: Blackstone’s Quasi-Triumph and
Cohen’s Fluctuating Fortune ............................................................ 



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