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| American Journal of Legal History | |
|---|---|
| Title | American Journal of Legal History |
| Discipline | Legal history |
| Abbreviation | Am. J. Leg. Hist. |
| Publisher | unknown |
| Country | United States |
| History | 1957–present |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
American Journal of Legal History is a peer-reviewed periodical dedicated to the study of legal history through historical, biographical, and comparative analyses that connect past jurisprudence to institutions and personalities. The journal publishes articles, essays, and review essays that examine developments in law across temporal and geographic boundaries, engaging with scholarship on courts, legislation, and legal actors. Contributors have approached topics ranging from early modern Common law to modern constitutional debates, illuminating figures and events that shaped rights, governance, and institutions.
The journal was founded in 1957 amid scholarly conversations involving historians and legal scholars influenced by figures such as Charles Warren, Max Farrand, Frederick Maitland, Henry Maine, and contemporaries at institutions like Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, University of Chicago Law School, and University of Pennsylvania Law School. Early editorial boards drew on networks including the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, and libraries such as the Library of Congress and the Bodleian Library. Over time the journal featured work on seminal episodes such as the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, and the New Deal. Contributors assessed legal texts including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaratory Act, and the Judiciary Act of 1789, while engaging with jurists and thinkers like John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, Theodore Roosevelt, and Roscoe Pound.
Articles typically situate legal change within events such as the French Revolution, the Congress of Vienna, the Seven Years' War, and the Industrial Revolution, or in relation to statutes and instruments like the Napoleonic Code, the Code Civil, the Statute of Westminster 1931, the Indian Penal Code, and the Treaty of Westphalia. The journal treats comparative cases across jurisdictions including England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Russia, Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Egypt, and Israel. It publishes research on courts and institutions such as the House of Lords, the Privy Council, the Supreme Court of the United States, the European Court of Human Rights, the International Court of Justice, and colonial judicial systems. Subject matter spans biographies of figures like William Blackstone, Edward Coke, Jeremy Bentham, Cesare Beccaria, Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, John Austin, Ronald Dworkin, Lon Fuller, and A.V. Dicey as well as studies of legal doctrines including property, contract, tort, criminal law, administrative law, and constitutionalism linked to events such as the Dreyfus Affair, the Nuremberg Trials, and the Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The editorial board has historically included scholars affiliated with centers like the Institute for Advanced Study, the Hoover Institution, the Benson Latin American Collection, and departments at Princeton University, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, University of Michigan, and Cornell University. Peer review follows standard double-blind procedures engaging reviewers who work on constitutionalism, diplomacy, social history, and intellectual history, often referencing methodologies developed by historians such as E.P. Thompson, Fernand Braudel, Carlo Ginzburg, and legal theorists like H.L.A. Hart.
The journal issues quarterly volumes and has been distributed through academic presses and scholarly platforms associated with publishers and institutions such as Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, University of Chicago Press, Columbia University Press, and university libraries including Harvard University Library and the British Library. Access is provided via institutional subscriptions held by repositories like JSTOR, Project MUSE, and national bibliographic services of United States Library of Congress and national libraries of Canada, Australia, and France. Back issues document topical responses to events such as the Watergate scandal, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, and the European Union enlargement debates.
The journal is abstracted and indexed alongside other periodicals in databases and indexes such as MLA International Bibliography, Historical Abstracts, America: History and Life, Web of Science, Scopus, LegalTrac, and bibliographies maintained by the American Bar Association, the Law Library of Congress, and university catalogues at Yale University Library.
Noteworthy contributions have examined landmark subjects including analyses of Marbury v. Madison, the constitutional theories of James Kent, studies of slavery and law in relation to the Slave Trade Act 1807, examinations of legal culture in the British Empire, and reconstructions of premodern legal history tied to the Justinian Code. Influential essays engaged with scholarly debates sparked by works from Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Roscoe Pound, Samuel P. Huntington, Charles A. Reich, and responses to jurisprudential movements exemplified by Legal Realism and Critical Legal Studies. The journal’s articles have been cited in monographs and textbooks from presses including Princeton University Press, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press and used in curricula at law schools and history departments such as Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, and Columbia University.
Comparable and related periodicals include Law and History Review, Journal of Legal Studies, International Journal of Constitutional Law, Modern Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Cambridge Law Journal, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, European Journal of International Law, American Journal of Comparative Law, Jewish Law Annual, Legal History Review, and regional journals tied to institutions like University of Toronto Press and Australian Journal of Legal History. The journal has influenced scholarly associations such as the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the British Legal History Society, and the International Society for Legal History.
Category:Legal journals