Unexplored Avenues in Comparative Anglo-American Legal History

Abstract

I assume Harry Lawson has always had the ability to stimulate. Certainly in the Oxford of the early 1950's, he stood almost alone. With the exception of linguistic philosophy and Roman law, the Honour School of Jurisprudence was committed to traditional legal scholarship. For those who cared about the common law and its institutions, and were anxious to see what lay "out there" in related disciplines, or even in what we naively believed to be the real world, the Lawson seminars at Brasenose became a "must." In different ways, through these seminars and his other teaching, Lawson must have inspired generations of undergraduates and graduates to begin asking the difficult questions: to think in an informal way about the law in context, and, in a more formal sense, to explore the boundaries of law and history and law and social sciences. Insofar as I have found myself able to ask questions about these relationships, I know I owe a great deal to the Professor of Comparative Law.