David Sugarman ismand of science as a way of seeking to control what was permitted to count as “legal” and “historical” scholarship.^! Two contemporary examples of this rivalry between law and history will have to suffice. Firstly, the leading historian of the governance of Tudor England sought to distance himself from legal history by declaring, “I am not a legal historian”.-- As he put it when he talked to the Illinois College of Lawin 1989: “when lawyers raise themselves above their customary preoccupations with pettyfoggery to scholarly pursuits, they do not commonly think historically.”^^ So he panned such lights of legal history as Holdsworth, Radzinowciz and Langbein. And he scoffed at the Lan: Quarterly Revieu:, the leading medium and exemplar par excellence of legal scholarship and legal history in the common law world. The Law Quarterly Review was “... an austere journal in which incomprehensible problems so regularly receive incomprehensible solutionsElton, like other historians, was never at ease with legal matters and failed to understand and take seriously the ideas and culture of the law that is essential for an understanding of the history of law and society. The unease that Elton felt for legal historians could also be reciprocated. Recently, at a celebration of the centenary of Pollock and Maitland’s, The History of English Law, the distinguished legal historian, S. F. C. Milsom, contended that the historian and the legal historian are very different; and that the methods of the historian do not suit the legal field where one is looking not so much for hard datable facts.This unfair characterisation of what most historians do illustrates the traditional gulf between the two disciplines. But it would be misleading to end on this depressing note. Rather, perhaps we should treat the views of Elton and Milsomas the last gasps of a Victorian conception of law and history, and of a Britain, that is largely no more. For as Michael Stoliess and Robert Gordon eloquently elaborate in their papers to this Conference, a new legal history has been in the making that largely transcends this disciplinary tribalism. Furthermore, this new legal history has beSugarman, David, “The Legal Boundaries of Liberty: Dicey, Liberalism and Legal Science,” Modern Lais: Revieis- 46 (1983): 102 and “Legal Theory, the Common Law Mind and the Making of the Textbook Tradition,” Legal Theory and Common Lais\ ed. William Twining. (Oxford Blackwell: 1986) 26; Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists. Cf. NX'hitman, James Q., The Legacy of Roman Laze in the German Romantic Era: Liistorical Vision and Legal Change, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). -- “English Law”, Studies 3 (40), 274. See, generally. Holmes, Clive. “G. R. Elton as a Legal Historian.” In Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Sixth Scries, (Cambridge: Cambridge Universitv Press, 1997) 301—16. -■* Review of J. H. Langbein in Times Literary Supplement 20 Sept. 1974, 991. S. F. C. Milsomhas repeatedly asserted that the historian and the legal historian are very different; and that the methods of the historian “do not suit the legal historian”. See, generally, S. F. C. Milsom, “Pollock and Maitland: a Lawyer’s Retrospect” in J. Hudson (ed.,). The History of English Laze: Centenary Essays on 'Pollock and Maitland’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 243-260. 224
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