Lkgai, history and intellectual history 37 ism, Contextualism, Tcxtualism, and New Historicism. The first of the four has few adherents and little currency today, but the other three remain yital. IL Since the 1950s, most scholarship in American legal history has taken the form (broadly speaking) of social, political, or ectsnomic history- studies of howthe deyelopment of particular systems of legal rules reflected or affected the shifting fortunes of particular socioeconomic classes (e.g., entrepreneurs, workers, farmers), political parties (e.g.. Federalists, Jacksonians), or economic systems (e.g., slayery, free-market capitalism, welfare capitalism).In the past two decades, howeyer, a growing group of legal historians haye been employing modes of inquiry and analysis best described as intellectual history. In these studies, law is characterized, not as a weapon in the war of parties and interest groups, but as a discursiye system, connected in myriad ways to the deyelopment of other discursiye systems (economic theories, political theories, popular political ideology, etc.). The methodological debates described in the preceding section arc plainly germane to this new style of legal history, but the extent to which those dcbates haye actually influenced scholarship in the new yein has been uneyen. Some of the legal historians pursuing the new line haye been well aware of, hayc expressly relied upon, and haye eycn sought to contribute to the methodological discussion. Others apparently have done their work (in some instances, excellent work) in ignorance of the raging controyersy. This section suryeys and catalogues the growing body of legal-history scholarship that takes the form of intellectual history, tracing the ways it has been affected, consciously or unconsciously, by the pertinent methodological theories. A. Of the four approaches. Structuralism surprisingly has had the greatest oyert effect on legal history. As suggested above, this approach had only a modest following among intellectual historians in general. By contrast. Structuralism The classic essays in American legal history were all written in one of these veins. See, e.g., WillardHurst, Liin' and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1956); MortonJ. Horwitz, The Transformation of American La%i', 1760-1S60 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1977); Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law(New York; Simon &Schuster, 1973). Much of the best monographic work continues to take these forms. See, e.g., Christine Rosen, “Differing Perceptions of the Value of Pollution across Time and Place: Balancing Doctrine in Pollution Nuisance Law, 1840-1906,” Law & History Review II (1993): 303; Barbara Y’. Welkc, “When All the Women were White, and All the Blacks were Men: Gender, Class, Race and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914,” Law & History Review 13 (1995); 261.
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