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Morton J. Horwitz (born 1938) is an American legal historian and law professor at Harvard Law School. The recent past dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, relates that during her time at law school, students often nicknamed him as "Mort the Tort" since he taught the first-year subject Torts.
Horwitz obtained an A.B. from the City College of New York (1959), an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1962 and 1964), and an LL.B. from Harvard Law School (1967).
He became an associate professor of law at Harvard Law School in 1970 and gained tenure as a full professor in 1974. In 1981, he was appointed the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History.
His first book, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, was published in 1977, and is widely regarded as one of the most important books in modern American legal historiography. It won the Bancroft Prize, the preeminent prize in American history in the United States. A product of its time, this book sought to give a "thick description" (à la Clifford Geertz) of the transformation of American law in the period, without appealing to "covering laws" (à la Carl Gustav Hempel). The book was conceived as an attack on the so-called "Consensus School" of American Legal History, which had dominated the field of Legal History in the 1950s and minimized the role of class dimensions in American legal history. The main argument of his book is that in the first half of the 19th century, many judges self-consciously allied themselves with a rapidly growing class of mercantile capitalists and promoted a series of legal rules which favored those capitalists.
In The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (1992), the sequel to his first book, Horwitz focused on the critics of the system which he described in his first book, especially Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound, and Karl Llewellyn. He frames this change in the law as a debate between "Legal Formalists" and "Legal Realists". He argues that in this period, the victors from his first book tried to present the current state of the law as the natural and necessary consequence of the application of the rules of reason. In their critique of Legal Formalism, the Legal Realists argued that the inductive and analogical model applied by the Legal Formalists was logically incoherent; that all law was ultimately a power relationship; and that, therefore, law was basically a form of public policy which should be decided on public policy grounds rather than by recourse to abstract categories like "reason".
In 1998, Horwitz published his third book, an encomium on the Warren Court entitled The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice.
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Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States during the 1970s. CLS adherents claim that laws are devised to maintain the status quo of society and thereby codify its biases against marginalized groups.
Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law; it is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, that is, it should rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world.
Richard Allen Epstein is an American legal scholar known for his writings on torts, contracts, property rights, law and economics, classical liberalism, and libertarianism. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University and the director of the Classical Liberal Institute. He also serves as the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.
Legal formalism is both a descriptive theory and a normative theory of how judges should decide cases. In its descriptive sense, formalists maintain that judges reach their decisions by applying uncontroversial principles to the facts; formalists believe that there is an underlying logic to the many legal principles that may be applied in different cases. These principles, they claim, are straightforward and can be readily discovered by anyone with some legal expertise. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., by contrast, believed that "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience". The formalist era is generally viewed as having existed from the 1870s to the 1920s, but some scholars deny that legal formalism ever existed in practice.
Nathan Roscoe Pound was an American legal scholar and educator. He served as dean of the University of Nebraska College of Law from 1903 to 1911 and was dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936. He was a member of Northwestern University, the University of Chicago Law School and the faculty at UCLA School of Law in the school's early years, from 1949 to 1952. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Pound as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.
John Hart Ely was an American legal scholar. He was a professor of law at Yale Law School from 1968 to 1973, Harvard Law School from 1973 to 1982, Stanford Law School from 1982 to 1996, and at the University of Miami Law School from 1996 until his death. From 1982 until 1987, he was the 9th dean of Stanford Law School.
Stephen Fain Williams was a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit until his death from complications of COVID-19 on August 7, 2020.
In American jurisprudence, the Restatements of the Law are a set of treatises on legal subjects that seek to inform judges and lawyers about general principles of common law. There are now four series of Restatements, all published by the American Law Institute, an organization of judges, legal academics, and practitioners founded in 1923.
The Warren Court was the period in the history of the Supreme Court of the United States during which Earl Warren served as the chief justice. He replaced the deceased Fred M. Vinson as chief justice in 1953 and remained in office until retiring in 1969, at which point he was replaced by Warren Burger. The Warren Court is often considered the most liberal court in U.S. history.
Roger John Traynor was the 23rd Chief Justice of California (1964–1970) and an associate justice of the Supreme Court of California from 1940 to 1964. Previously, he had served as a Deputy Attorney General of California under Earl Warren, and an Acting Dean and Professor of UC Berkeley School of Law. He is widely considered to be one of the most creative and influential judges and legal scholars of his time.
Charles Anthony Fried is an American jurist and lawyer. He served as United States Solicitor General under President Ronald Reagan from 1985 to 1989. He is a professor at Harvard Law School and has been a visiting professor at Columbia Law School. He also serves on the board of the nonpartisan group, the Campaign Legal Center.
The Nature of the Judicial Process is a legal classic written by Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, and New York Court of Appeals Chief Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo in 1921. It was compiled from The Storrs Lectures delivered at Yale Law School earlier that year.
Raoul Berger was an American attorney and professor at The University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, he was the Charles Warren Senior Fellow in American Legal History. He is known for his role in the development of originalism.
Daniel A. Farber is an American lawyer, law professor, author, and historian. He is the Sho Sato Professor of Law at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Charles Warren was an American lawyer and legal scholar who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book The Supreme Court in United States History (1922).
Richard Allen Posner is an American legal scholar who served as a federal appellate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1981 to 2017. A senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Posner was identified by The Journal of Legal Studies as the most-cited legal scholar of the 20th century. As of 2021, he is also the most-cited legal scholar of all time. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential legal scholars in the United States.
Skepticism in law is a school of jurisprudence that was a reaction against the idea of natural law, and a response to the 'formalism' of legal positivists. Legal skepticism is sometimes known as legal realism.
Henry Melvin Hart Jr. (1904–1969) was an American legal scholar. He was an influential member of the Harvard Law School faculty from 1932 until his death in 1969.
Ganesh Sitaraman is an American legal scholar. He is a professor of law at Vanderbilt University, where he has also been a Chancellor Faculty Fellow and the director of the Program in Law and Government. He studies constitutional and foreign relations law.
George Edward White is an American legal historian, tort law scholar, and the David and Mary Harrison Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.
