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This chapter examines twentieth-century British scholarship on medieval English legal history. Legal history has long been a marginal subject within British academic life, falling somewhat clumsily between the two stools of law and history, although it is an essential part of both subjects. There were very few English medieval legal historians at work during the twentieth century and this is unlikely to change for the better in the future.

This chapter focuses on the two bodies of law — case-law and statute law. It proposes the complexities posed to legal historians by the co-existence of these two bodies of law, operating on different planes and sometimes in discord, and yet both within the understanding and contemplation of lawyers. It also makes a clear differentiation the two laws by reconstructing events during the medieval and early-modern periods. Moreover, it evaluates several internal conflicts of law, extra-legal practices, and non-contentious forms of litigation.

This chapter addresses the question of what legal history is a history of. It begins by drawing the more or less conventional division between external legal history and internal legal history. It then focuses on internal legal history, which deals with law on its own terms. Its sources are predominantly those drawn up by the legal process – in England, that is, records of courts, law reports, and legal treatises – and its practitioners are as often as not trained lawyers, or at least scholars whose discipline is law. On the face of internal legal history there cannot be any doubt that it is the history of law, but the real problem is to decide what we mean by law.

This book presents chapters that offer an illuminating cross-section of the questions, sources, and narratives used by historians working in the field of American legal history today. Its goal is to honor William E. Bill Nelson's convictions about the historical enterprise, above all the central importance of identifying a genuine problem, undertaking original research, and telling a compelling story. The volume's contributors do not subscribe to a single programmatic theme or method. Instead, they ask different questions, use an array of sources, and tell their stories in individual ways. The remainder of the chapter briefly discusses Nelson's contributions to scholarship on American legal and constitutional history, followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter asks: irrespective of the frequency of elected branch sanctions, do federal judges defer to elected branch preferences in their decisions? This chapter, and the ones that follow, narrow the focus from the federal courts in general to the Supreme Court in particular. In recent years, legal historians have engaged in a lively debate over whether the justices of the Supreme Court defer to elected branch preferences in their decisions. This chapter looks at how quantitative analysts have approached the empirical question of estimating the Court's independence (or lack thereof) from elected branch preferences.