From the Faculty Lounge:

Here’s a link to a panel discussion of G. Edward White’s Law in American History: From the Colonial Era Through the Civil War, which was held at UVA Law School back on February 22. The speakers are Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Fred Konefsky, and John Witt. Tomiko and Fred have a number of observations about White’s methodology (in particular his contrast with Lawrence Friedman’s law and society approach and Tomiko is particularly interested in Native American ideas about law and their contact with European Americans and also the role of the law in the development of capitalism) and John asks some meta questions about why we do legal history (and he hypothesizes what White might be doing here). All of this reminds me that I want to talk soon about what why I write legal history and also about what we’re increasingly calling applied legal history. And also what role law has as a form of technology that’s used to implement basic desires and why others see law as more of an independent variable that controls us and what we do. There’s a lot to talk about here and I hope that at some point Tomiko’s, Fred’s, and John’s papers appear somewhere, to extend the conversation.