Over at
JOTWELL,
Roman Hoyos (Southwestern Law School) reviews
Tabatha Abu El-Haj, "
Changing the People: Legal Regulation and American Democracy," Vol. 86,
New York University Law Review (2011)
. In doing so, he comments on "
the role of legal history in legal scholarship." Here's a taste:
What struck me immediately about the article was how Abu El-Haj framed
it. In a seven-page introduction she spends two paragraphs on legal
historiography; her main target is law and democracy scholarship.
Consciously or not, Abu El-Haj has offered an example of how to smooth
the ground between historian and legal scholar. Translating between
disciplines, Elizabeth Mertz has told us, is a project fraught with
misunderstanding. But, perhaps because of her training in a law and
society program, Abu El-Haj appears to have both the fluency and
willingness to attempt an effective translation. In this article, for
example, she uses “the repertoire of democratic political practices” in
the past to expose and undermine two major assumptions of modern law and
democracy scholarship.
Read on
here.
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