Transformations

Abstract

So routinely do legal historians today make The Transformation of American Law their starting point that we risk forgetting how revolutionary it seemed 25 years ago. I need only see its cover to be transported back to the fall of 1976: Once again, I am a third-year law student taking my first legal history course, and I am for the first time reading the two articles that became Chapters 1 and 8 of Transformation: "The Emergence of an Instrumental Conception of Law" and "The Rise of Legal Formalism" (Honvitz 1971 and 1975). Honvitz did not expressly say that "until we are able to transcend the American fixation with. .. separating law from politics," each generation was doomed "frantically to hide behind unhistorical and abstract universalisms in order to deny. .. its own political and moral choices" until Transformation 11 (1992, 272). Nevertheless, that was clearly the subtext of the articles. As one who had studied history in college and who had spent the previous two years wondering why my law professors were so insistent on separating law from politics, context, morality, and plain old idiosyncrasy, I found his message extraordinarily refreshing. Then and there, I decided to become a legal historian. The distance between my undergraduate and legal education mirrored that between the disciplines of history and law. The singular achievement of Transformation was to bridge the two. As someone starting out in academic life, I innocently assumed that achievement would win the book not just canonical status, but garlands as well. Consequently, I was stunned by the intensity of the reaction against the book at the time of its publication. Many of the reviews of Transformation were singularly snotty (see Holt 1982). How do we explain them?