Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The paper explores the relationship between two different times: the time of history and the time of the common law. Specifically, in the context of the early nineteenth century United States, it explores how American legal thinkers bought the dominant historical sensibilities of the day to bear upon the common law--it shows how the common law was contextualized and relativized in terms of this historical sensibility. At the same time, however, the paper shows how the traditional non-historical temporality of the common law informed the dominant historical sensibility itself. In other words, the common law was both set in history and released from it, accounted for in terms of history even as it accounted for history.