Legal History in the Curriculum: Comparative Perspectives, Critical Approaches and Future Directions

As legal education faces fresh challenges and opportunities, and a growing literature calls for subversive new approaches, this book engages with vital questions about the place of history in the law school. How and why should we teach legal history? What is its place in the curriculum? What can different jurisdictions learn from each other?

This collection offers an overview and examples of cutting-edge practice in teaching legal history across the law curriculum, challenging expectations of its place and potential. The book’s three sections explore practices and possibilities in the core curriculum, in dedicated legal history courses and in law schools across the world. They highlight how legal history offers diverse and inclusive content, global perspectives, and transnational understandings to students. By exploring contributors’ own purposes and practices, they provide insight and fresh ideas on how and why readers can incorporate legal histories into their own teaching.

The volume will be an invaluable resource for all those involved in the teaching of law and the law school curriculum.

Caroline Derry is Professor of Feminism, Law and History at the Open University, UK, and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Carol Howells is Senior Lecturer in Law at the Open University, UK.