Response: A Muddle in the Middle

Abstract

In this Essay, I offer two ruminations about the field of legal history, as reflected or refracted in the essays in this symposium on my work. First, the changing subjects and approaches that have characterized my work and that occasioned these essays reflect many of the changes in the field over the past forty years. Or better, they demonstrate the field’s reconstruction over the past forty years. They sit between and draw on both the professional discourses of history and of academic law as each changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. And second, those changing subjects and approaches are unified by a commitment to and an exploration of complexity and of middle spaces. That commitment represents a fundamental challenge to many of the core assumptions and practices of leading figures in legal history.