Bob Gordon’s most famous article, Critical Legal Histories, published in the pages of the Stanford Law Review in 1984, was an instant classic, and it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that it redefined the field of legal history and set the agenda for two generations of legal historians. The article is nonetheless but a piece of Gordon’s wide-ranging and hugely influential body of scholarship on critical historicism, a representative sampling of which has been gathered together in the volume Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law. As numerous speakers at the Stanford Law School conference marking its publication noted, the sum of the work is even greater than its parts, making us see his influence in a new light altogether. With generosity and enthusiasm for the creative potential of legal history and historians, Gordon has shown us the many ways history animates, disturbs, challenges, and upends received wisdom, especially the view that things have always been and must always be a certain way. It is the untamable past that electrifies Gordon’s essays, from his brilliant disquisitions on scholars from F.W. Maitland to Owen Fiss, to his penetrating critiques of originalism on today’s U.S. Supreme Court and the uses of history in legal regimes confronting a shameful past.

* Ariela J. Gross is the John B. & Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law & 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. Susanna L. Blumenthal is the William Prosser Professor of Law, Professor of History, and Co-director of the Program in Law and History, University of Minnesota.