FEATURE POST: Law Professor Tom Simmons Reviews New Title, History of the Common Law

Professor Tom Simmons is contributing to the collection development effort of the USD Law Library.  Under a recently adopted program, Professors make recommendations for titles to be added to the Law Library collection.  Consistent with the Collection Development Policy of the Law Library, titles recommended for acquisition by the faculty are given priority consideration.  If  the recommended title is acquired, the faculty member provides a brief review of the title for publication on the Law Library Blog.

Below Professor Simmons provides the first review under the new program.  Thank you Professor Simmons!

Langbein, John H., Lerner, Renee L. and Smith, Bruce P., History of the Common Law: TheDevelopment of Anglo-American Legal Institutions, Copyright 2000 by Aspen Publishers.

Professor Langbein, Yale Law School’s Sterling Professor of Law and Legal History, is best known for his influential work on trust, probate, pension and investment law, but he also written extensively on the development of criminal procedure and the common law, including Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancient Regime (1977). 

Professor Langbein, along with his co-author/editors, Professor Lerner and Dean Smith, authored and edited History of the Common Law as a textbook for an introductory law school course in Anglo-American legal history. Its authors made use of previously unpublished materials from Professors Langbein, Goebel, and Dawson as well as judicial decisions stretching back to the thirteenth century and recent scholarship as well.   It is a book with few competitors for law school classes on its subject and was, in fact, the first law school teaching book to be produced in full color.  The textbook makes use of gorgeous illustrations, from medieval illuminated manuscripts to contemporary photographs. 

The book underscores the emergence of the jury system, the conflict between law and equity, and the development of the legal profession, from serjeants and barristers in the medieval world, to twenty-first century transnational megafirms and other contemporary American legal institutions and doctrines. 

Its scope, if anything, despite its more than 1100 pages, may be over-ambitious.  The text assumes, for example, a working knowledge of English history which many students may lack.  The introduction acknowledges this choice by the authors: “To keep the book manageable for a one-semester course, we have had to exclude or provide only skeletal coverage of many strands of legal historical inquiry that are full of interest, such as the history of legal doctrine and legal theory, constitutional and political history, and many of the social and economic dimensions.” 

 Thomas E. Simmons

Assistant Professor
University of South Dakota
School of Law