Reviews of Books

Collections of essays by different authors tend to offer more puzzles than answers in their range and unevenness. Even so, The Many Legalities of Early America offers more puzzles than most, and the mystery grows in light of the high quality of the essays in this particular volume. The puzzles themselves can best be expressed in a series of questions. Why do the editors, Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, disagree so starkly about what they think they might be accomplishing? Why do essayists who pride themselves on their detailed examination of empirical data call so stridently for an overriding and controlling rubric, "legalities," as their calling card, when the claim, as they admit, appears "little more than rhetorical cleverness" (p. 3)? Why is the voiced fear of intellectual backwardness--"We want to bring law's place in colonization up to speed" (p. 18)--relevant in essays that cite so many previous scholars in the field as inspirations? Then, too, how are we to take allusions to "the dark side" (p. 5) of the study of law in colonial America with its presumption of another kind, presumably somewhat closer to the angels? Finally, which of the many calls for the integrity of particularity and plurality in investigation should we follow to satisfy the contrasting demand for "a compelling overall narrative" with "worldview" and "coherence" (pp. 9–10) when we try to describe the American strand?

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Such questions are significant because they reach through the volume under review toward a general understanding of early American legal history and its practitioners. But before seeking answers in this collection, we should note a subterranean characteristic of the puzzles before us: namely, a strain of scholarly self-pity, which, like most forms of self-pity, quickly turns into self-indulgence. Tomlins, in his introduction, worries overly about "another reign of error" (p. 18) that may follow hard on the egregious mistakes of the past, about "the imputed irrelevance of colonial to national law" (p. 10), about "the field's larger [and unresolved] conceptual problems" (p. 8). Above all, he worries about neglect on the part of an unidentified reader. "Those who would embark on the writing of legal history," he warns sententiously, "are also obligated to offer some explanation why anyone now should care" (p. 19). Anyone? Now? An initial clue to an answer lies buried in the afterword of Tomlins's co-editor, Bruce Mann, and it pointedly raises Tomlins's inevitable first reader, the reader as writer. In a voice far from the tonal qualities of Tomlins's introduction, Mann wryly notes, "the essays that engage law most directly are by the one law professor in the volume, Mary Sarah Bilder, and by David Thomas Konig, who has always been the most lawyerly of nonlawyer legal historians" (p. 445). Indeed, of the other essayists in his volume, historians all, Mann quietly confesses "their engagement with the law is more incidental than central" (p. 444).

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