Law History Text Writing Ironic Legal Histories

This book presents a fresh approach to the writing of legal history as an essentially textual enterprise. It argues that to write any history is to tell a story. In doing so it appreciates the place not just of context and contingency in the history of law but also of humanity. Law is a human creation for which reason it accommodates both reason and romance. Absent sensibility it makes no sense. This book accordingly tells four stories about law. A first revisits a familiar institution the English monarchy. A second reads history through the lens of a particular author Daniel Defoe. A third writes a history of a few hundred yards of Bristol eighteenth-century England’s premier slave-port. A fourth investigates a peculiar and hideous fantasy. Engaging texts drawn from literature philosophy and politics as well as law this work will appeal to any scholar or student interested not just in the past of law but also in its imagining and inscription. |Law History Text Writing Ironic Legal Histories