Academic

Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law

By Alfred Brophy

As promised,  now that I've seen the Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, I have a few thoughts.  First off, it's a wonderfully creative volume, with essays on all sorts of key figures in law--and law is broadly construed.  You don't have to be a lawyer to be in here.  Herman Melville and Dred Scott are both here.   So is O.J. Simpson and so are Julius and Ethel Roseberg and Ulysses S. Grant.

 This is going to be in every law library and lots of other libraries; the entries are fantastic--concise, well-written; they highlight why we care about these people and place them in the context of their times.  This is great legal history, because there are themes and legal thought and practice is connected to the surrounding culture.  This may be the most important single volume published on legal history since I entered teaching--and there's a lot of competition for that honor.

Second, the list of contributors is really broad.  I do wish that the list of contributors listed what they contributed, but perhaps it's too "inside legal history" to justify the extra paper.  Also, I wish there were an index--but again, that might be asking too much.

Third, what about the subjects who inhabit this volume?  Obviously, when you're dealing with a field like American legal history from the colonial era to the present, the possibilities for people to include is effectively endless.  Jeremy Bentham's in here--which is a little odd.  Now, I recognize he's a huge figure and a great person, but....  As for other unusual entries, William Blackstone's in here, too. I didn't know that he ever set foot in the Americas.  There's a reasonable justification for including Bentham and Blackstone, for sure.  The volume is heavy on the twentieth century, also for good reason.  

And because it's legal history, it's obviously going to be a candidate for Ann Bartow's question, "where are the women?"  Since Melville's in here, I would have included some other nineteenth century figures in literature--and would have used that as a way to integrate this volume.  Harriet Beecher Stowe said a few things about law.  In fact, my colleague John Orth quotes her in his entry on Thomas Ruffin and Debby Applegate refers to her in the entry on Henry Ward Beecher (a non-lawyer, btw--though he was involved in a famous adultery trial).  I'd have included Stowe in a main entry--so, too, for Elizabeth Cady Stanton (I know, some of you may think her rather cliched, but encyclopedias are filled with cliches).   I'd also have included Ralph Ellison and Nat Turner, but these are decisions that are idiosyncratic, perhaps.  When you've got to limit it to 700 entries, well, it makes for some tough choices.

If you love (or even enjoy) law, this volume will provide a lot of entertainment.  I see this as a great gift for a lawyer.  It's the best $65 you're going to spend in a while.  (Unless, like many of the rest of us, you're back to your graduate school habits of eating raman noodles, and you eat for a couple months on $65.)  But it's certainly a beautiful volume and well, well worth the read.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 18, 2009 (boomark / email).