Edited by ari mermelstein, victoria saker woeste, ethan zadoff, and marc galanter. This collection of essays on is now available as an ebook $9.99 and in paper $36.99 it may be purchased in hardback next month. The press explains: jews are a people of law, and law defines who the jewish people are and what they believe. This anthology engages with the growing complexity of what it is to be jewish and, more problematically, what it means to be at once jewish and participate in secular legal systems as lawyers, judges, legal thinkers, civil rights advocates, and teachers.

The essays in this book trace the history and chart the sociology of the jewish legal profession over time, revealing new stories and dimensions of this significant aspect of the american jewish experience and at the same time exploring the impact of jewish lawyers and law firms on american legal practice. And here are the blurbs: this superb collection reveals what an older focus on assimilation obscured. Jewish lawyers wanted to 'make it,' but they also wanted to make law and the legal profession different and better. These fascinating essays show how, despite considerable obstacles, they succeeded.

Ernst, professor of law, georgetown university law center this fascinating collection of essays by distinguished scholars illuminates the distinctive and intricate relationship between jews and law. Exploring the various roles of jewish lawyers in the united states, germany, and israel, they reveal how the practice of law has variously expressed, reinforced, or muted jewish identity as lawyers demonstrated their commitments to the public interest, social justice, jewish tradition, or personal ambition. Any student of law, lawyers, or jewish values will be engaged by the questions asked and answered. Auerbach, professor emeritus of history, wellesley college i hear from the publisher, alan childress, that quid pro books republication of c. and the holistic approach to legal cultures. facoltа di giurisprudenza, universitа del piemonte orientale a.

Avogadro. what can comparative law do for legal history? the question has no obvious answer today, in our age of specialized disciplines, such as legal history and comparative law 1. In doing this, the present contribution advances some points of view that may foster a new dialogue among scholars who may want to cross the line between the fields of comparative law and legal history. As a matter of fact, though the birth of modern historiography owes much to the development of comparative studies in the field of law 3. Most legal history today is written without paying regard to comparative legal studies. The same is true for comparative law: comparative law scholarship seldom delves deeply into the historical dimension of the law, but rather focuses on the present alone. Of course, there are welcome and important exceptions to this attitude in both comparative law and legal history, and i will turn to them while discussing my opening question. Nevertheless, the relationship between comparative law and legal history, though often stressed 4.

Is seldom explored by the majority of contemporary legal historians and comparativists. I am content to note that, at least in europe, legal history shares the fate of comparative law. Both disciplines feature in a cursory way, if at all, in the literature which is devoted to the exposition of the law for the benefit of students or practicing lawyers. Thus, the rarity of the historical and comparative perspective on the law produces a dim awareness of the law we live by. How can comparative law contribute to legal history, and thus eventually lead to a better understanding of the law? comparative law may influence the practice and the study of legal history in at least three ways. First, the comparative study of different historical facts may help to define the various factors that cause a certain historical outcome. Sometimes this is perceived as the only proper exercise in comparative legal history.

It is easy to agree with this view, but there are reasons to believe that such a use of the comparative method is just one of the possible uses of the comparative law approach to legal history. Second, comparative law can help legal historians to appreciate the extent to which the history of law is a story of give and take, of trade in legal rules, institutions and doctrines, across frontiers. Third, comparative law may shape historiography by providing a critical assessment of each historiographical tradition. These various products of the comparative approach to legal history can hardly be separated. Yet, for the sake of analytical clarity, it is better to consider them one by one.

The potential impact of the first one is addressed by other contributions to this symposium 5. Thus i will concentrate on the second and on the third contribution that comparative law can make to legal history. Comparative law, diffusionism, and legal history. any legal historian knows several examples of how institutions, doctrines and legal rules, which are present in a given territory, have their roots elsewhere. The best known examples of this complex phenomenon, in the history of law before the enactment of the civil codes, are provided by the diffusion of the roman law in the middle ages 6. Closer to us in time, the adoption of the civil codes by countries that have different social and economic structures 7 and the expansion of the common law throughout the world 8 are other illustrations of the dimensions of this dynamic. From the comparative lawyer’s point of view, however, one may ask whether all the implications of the growth of the law by diffusion 9 have been really appreciated by legal historians.