| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

William M. Wiecek. The Lost World of Classical Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886–1937. Paperback edition. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. viii, 286. $17.95.
There is no one better suited to write a synthetic history of the rise and fall of classical legal thought (legal formalism) in the United States than William M. Wiecek, but from its intriguing title to its powerful closing passages, this book will stir controversy among legal scholars and intellectual historians. Like the scientists in Jules Verne's and Michael Crichton's novels, Wiecek has brought to life a lost world: one so distant in time and ideology from modern thinking that its judicial and jurisprudential characters seem like dinosaurs. Yet in their age, from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s, they dominated the world of legal thought as completely as the dinosaurs ruled their own epoch. And both ages ended cataclysmically. Classical legal thought died at the end of the 1930s, as the U.S. Supreme Court bowed to the legal pragmatism of the New Deal and a new generation took charge of the nation's jurisprudence. Wiecek's is a remarkable feat of time travel. Not only does he bring these dinosaurs back to life, he almost convinces his readers to lament their demise (even as he engages in a brilliant critique of their inconsistencies and foibles).	1
Good lawyer (as well as scholar) that he is, Wiecek first defines his terms in a way that supports his case. For him, legal classicism is an ideology that possessed a distinctive pattern of reasoning, social value system, and set of beliefs about the nature and source of law. The occasional contradictions in various Supreme Court opinions and treatises concerning government power and individual rights mirrored legal classicism's complicated foundations in the legal debates, civil strife, and social dislocations from the colonial period to Reconstruction.	. . .

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