Description
Historical reasoning is an integral part of drafting legislation and deciding cases. Issues are defined as being "like" or "unlike" past cases, issues or events. Laws and policy proposals are evaluated against assumptions about past behavior and trends. Whenever lawyers or legislators reason from analogies or precedents or use statistical data they act as historians. Yet, to borrow from H.L. Mencken, some historians have proved to be less analysts of the past than "unsuccessful novelists." To make you historians - and lawyers - rather than novelists, this course examines the historical assumptions that have given rise to law and public policy in several areas of public-interest practice and current impact litigation, charting the shift in those assumptions over time.
