Some of the most exciting and innovative legal scholarship has been driven by historical curiosity. Legal history today comes in a fascinating array of shapes and sizes, from microhistory to global intellectual history. Legal history has expanded beyond traditional parochial boundaries to become increasingly international and comparative in scope and orientation.

Drawing on scholarship from around the world, and representing a variety of methodological approaches, areas of expertise, and research agendas, this timely compendium takes stock of legal history and methodology and reflects on the various modes of the historical analysis of law, past, present, and future.

Part I explores the relationship between legal history and related historical perspectives including economic, philosophical, sociological, comparative, literary, and rhetorical approaches. Part II considers various approaches to legal history. Part III focuses on the interrelation between legal history and jurisprudence by investigating the role and conception of historical inquiry in various models, schools, and movements of legal thought. Part IV traces the place and pursuit of historical analysis in various legal systems and traditions across time, cultures, and space. Finally, Part V narrows the Handbook's focus to explore several examples of legal history in action, including its use in various legal doctrinal contexts.

Markus D. Dubber's profile page

Christopher Tomlins' profile page

Markus Dubber is Professor of Law and Director of the Centre for Ethics at the University of Toronto. Much of Markus's scholarship has focused on theoretical, comparative, and historical aspects of criminal law. He has published, as author or editor, eighteen books as well as over seventy papers; his work has appeared in English and German, and has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Persian, and Spanish. His publications include Criminal Law: A Comparative Approach (with Tatjana Hörnle) (2014); The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law (with Tatjana Hörnle) (2014); Foundational Texts in Modern Criminal Law (2014); The New Police Science: The Police Power in Domestic and International Governance (with Mariana Valverde) (2006); The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (2005); and Victims in the War on Crime (2002).

Christopher Tomlins is the Elizabeth J. Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 2014. Trained as a historian at The Johns Hopkins University, his teaching career began in 1980 at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he was successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and University Reader in Legal Studies. In 1992 Tomlins joined the research faculty of the American Bar Foundation, Chicago, where he remained until 2009, when he became Chancellor's Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine. Tomlins' primary affiliation at Berkeley Law is to the Jurisprudence and Social Policy (Ph.D.) program, in which he teaches courses on the history and law of slavery, and on legal history. He also teaches in the undergraduate Legal Studies Program.