My initial encounter with critical legal historicism was as a graduate student in history at Stanford trying to decide whether to stay in graduate school, teach, and do research, or go to law school to pursue politics. During my first year, I lurked around the law school, attending my first legal history workshop. It was a discussion of Bob Gordon’s Critical Legal Histories, then six years old. It was an exciting departure from typical academic prose—the élan of the writing, the insouciance of summarizing swaths of historiography in a few characteristic bon mots, and especially the insights into the inadequacy and overdeterminism of “evolutionary functionalism,” which characterized so much of the historical work I had read. But the most electrifying thing about Critical Legal Histories was the idea of the legal historian as a swashbuckling crusader knocking down the canards of received thought, killing or taming dragons, offing the fathers. It was heady stuff. For someone on the cusp of deciding between a career in politics fighting for justice and a career as a historian telling stories about the past, it was exciting that perhaps one could do both.

* John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Legal History, University of Southern California Gould School of Law; 2017-2018 Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University.