David M. Rabban is Dahr Jamail, Randall Hage Jamail and Robert Lee Jamail Regents Chair in Law and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas School of Law. Rabban is the author of Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years (Cambridge University Press, 1997), which won the 1998 Morris D. Forkosch Prize presented by the Journal of the History of Ideas and the 1998 Eli M. Oboler Award of the American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Roundtable.

• Introduction: the historical study of law in the United States; Part I. The European Background: 1. The historical nineteenth century; 2. German legal scholarship; 3. English legal scholarship: Sir Henry Maine; Part II. The Historical Turn in American Legal Scholarship: 4. Henry Adams and his students: the origins of professional legal history in America; 5. Melville M. Bigelow: from the history of Norman Procedure to protorealism; 6. Holmes the historian; 7. Thayer on the history of evidence; 8. Ames on the history of the common law; 9. The history of American constitutional law; 10. The historical school of American jurisprudence; Part III. Maitland, Pound, and Pound's Successors: 11. Maitland: the maturity of English legal history; 12. Pound: from historical to sociological jurisprudence; 13. Pound's successors: twentieth-century interpretations of late nineteenth-century American legal thought.

'This is a pioneering study of American historical jurisprudence in the late nineteenth century. It is comprehensive, meticulous, and deeply learned. It is cosmopolitan, placing the Americans among their European predecessors and counterparts. And it is eye-opening: the standard picture of this era's legal scholars as political reactionaries and abstract deductive 'formalists' cannot possibly survive this splendid and important book.' Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School