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Legal and Constitutional History
Nelson, William
Nelson, William
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Abstract
A decade ago I contributed to the Annual Survey of American Law my first review of the literature in the field of American legal history. This year I would like to look back over the past ten with the hope of identifying at least some of the continuities and changes in the literature during that period. Continuities in the Literature.-Many legal historians continue to concentrate on discussions of factual data in their writings about the American legal past. Some legal historians, such as Robert Mennel in Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825- 1940, have enlarged our factual knowledge on a variety of narrow topics. Others are still writing books and articles which do little other than cover familiar factual ground. Such works include Alan Reitman'sbook, The Pulse of Freedom: American Liberties, 1920-1970's,5 which deals with the struggle for civil liberties in the United States during the past fifty years; Walter Trattner's, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, which discusses the history of the nation's social welfare system over the past three centuries; and, Milton Read's article on land tenure in colonial Georgia which retells how the efforts of Georgia's trustees "to eliminate economic privilege within their model community in America" resulted in their restricting the size of farms and the tenure by which they were held.