The Historians of Anglo-American Law

Beginning with Coke and Selden, Holdsworth surveys the work of the great practitioners of Anglo-American legal history. Originally published: New York: Columbia University Press, 1928. 175 pp. "In this reprint of lectures delivered by the learned author in the United States of America, the course of the literature of Anglo-American legal history is portrayed in an illuminating fashion. Pursuing a chronological sequence, the lectures survey the effect of the historical tradition of the common lawyers before legal history began to be written, in which class the learned author puts the work of Coke, passing on to the more historical work of the later authors of whom the first appears to be Selden, while the last include the names of several living writers, both English and American. (...) [N]o one interested in the growth of Anglo-American law can fail to read with pleasure and profit this stimulating treatment of the development of legal history." --Law Quarterly Review 44: 392. WILLIAM S. HOLDSWORTH [1871-1944] was a professor at the University of Cambridge from 1903-1908 and Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford from 1922-1944. He is well-known for his monumental A History of English Law (1903-1966) and other works, such as Charles Dickens as a Legal Historian (1929) and Some Makers of English Law (1938).