William W. Fisher III 42 In the last few years, similar (though not always so finely wrought) contextualist legal histories have been appearing with ever greater frequency.Nathaniel Berman, for example, contends that understanding the transformation of international lawin the period between the First and Second World War requires “explicating its underlying framework of assumptions” - a framework that was “not always fully apparent to the interwar writers themselves, much less to their post-World War II successors.” That framework (which Berman labels “international legal modernism”) turns out to have been derived, to a significant degree, from “an array of early twentieth-century movements for cultural renewal in other domains.Similarly, Stephen Siegel argues that, to decipher the work of the late nineteenth-century treatise writer, Joel Bishop, one must not only steep oneself in the writings of Bishop’s scholarly contemporaries (other classical legal theorists), but also locate the repots of the concepts and terms Bishop employed. Only through an appreciation of Bishop’s indebtedness to an Americanized version of Scottish moral philoSophy, for example, can one determine precisely what Bishop had in mind when he suggested that God participates in the decisionmaking of well-qualified and impartial judges.Martha Lees argues in a recent essay that the vocabularies and concepts with which state courts sought (before the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Euclid) to resolve the issue of the constitutionality of residential zoning can be traced in large part to three sets of attitudes in general circulation in the early twentieth century: the cult of domesticity; the pastoral ideal; and the beliefs associated with the nascent publichealth movement. Much of my own work has taken similar forms. For example, I have argued that the disparate and seemingly contradictory statements and rules issued by state legislatures and courts during the early nineteenth century concerning the legal status of slaves are best interpreted as outgrowths of intense controversies among antebellum Southerners on three issues: the character and proclivities In addition to the studies discussed below, see Novak, supra n. 48; Michael Klarman, “Judicial Review, the Court’s Countermaje^ritarian Capacitv, and the Future of Constitutional Historv” (presented to the Harv’ard Legal Historv Speaker Series, Nov. 13, 1994); Daniel R. Ernst, “Cornmon Laborers? Industrial Pluralists, Legal Realists, and the Law of Industrial Disputes, 1915-1943,” Lan' & History Revieu' 11 (1993): 59; Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in AntebellumAmerica,”7o«r?z.i/ of American History 82 (1995), 463-94. ”‘But the Alternative is Despair’: European Nationalism and the Modernist Renewal of International Law,” Harvard Lav Reviev 106 (1993): 1795, 1798. See also Nathaniel Berman, “Modernism, Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction,” }'alcJournal of Lav and Humanitics 4 (1992): 351 (elaborating on the methodology). Stephen A. Siegel, “Joel Bishop’s Orthodoxy,” Lav & Histoiy Reviev 13 (1995): 215. Martha A. Lees, “Preserving Property Values? Preserving Proper Homes? Preserving Privilege?: The Pre-Euclid Debate over Zoning for Exclusively Private Residential Areas, 1916-1926,” Univ. ofPittsburgh Lav Reviev 56 (1994): 367.
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