Book Review

Having had his say about other historians' "inventing the middle ages," Norman Cantor now turns to his own "imagining" of the law. Cantor began his career in the 1950s as perhaps the brightest star among American medievalists of that generation—an extraordinarily popular undergraduate lecturer as well as a fine scholar, whose projected trilogy on Church-State relations in the eleventh and twelfth centuries never got beyond an impressive first volume, Church, Kingship, and Lay Investiture in England 1089-1135. After that Cantor turned his hand, prolifically, to the writing and editing of textbooks, anthologies, and works of popularization concerning the meaning of the Middle Ages and, offhandedly, the fads and foibles of our own multiculturally embattled times. He has also written extensively, provocatively, and sometimes recklessly about medievalists he has known, and their own fads and foibles. The present book, while it displays features of Cantor's early erudition and expertise, is largely a product of the later stages of his career, especially of his undergraduate lectures and adult education popularizations, adorned as usual with opinions about contemporary scholars, career making, and the condition of Anglophone culture.	1
Cantor wants to reach as large a public as possible, as indicated by his informal, sometimes jocular style and by his efforts at contemporary parallels. "This book is written for the layman and the beginning student," he declares—and perhaps for practicing lawyers (who are also laymen as far as history is concerned, especially in this country). What, for such an audience, is the "meaning" of legal history?	2
Cantor recognizes seven "paradigms" and characterizes them in a summary and sententious fashion. There is: (1) "the mainline approach" (Maitland, J. W. Hurst, perhaps Geoffrey Elton, to whom Cantor dedicates his book); (2) Marxism (Morton Horowitz), for which "legal systems simply serve as the instruments of dominant classes"; (3) the "Foucault-feminist power, pessimism" view, which assumes that the law "serves the holders of power at any time and place"; (4) the "Lacanian, psychoanalytic" approach, which "somehow connect[s] judicial and psychosexual forms of repression"; (5) the "precomputer" structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, which reduces mind and society to "common binary structural forms" as part of a universal system; (6) deconstructionism, which separates law from ethics and regards it as "intrinsically fragile and ... susceptible to breakdown, contradiction and alteration"; and (7) "law and economics," which sees the law "through the prism of market economics" ("critical legal studies"—CLS—including various combinations of approaches 2-6).	3
Although for Cantor "these appellations are largely marketing devices within legal academia" and have produced no synthesis, they are unavoidable; and he takes the historian's job to be to "pick his or her way eclectically among the theories as the opportunity arises" and above all "to tell a clear and emotionally satisfying story." Cantor's story is indeed clear—not for him the niceties of British revisionism that rejects large continuities in histories of any sort—and, arguably, emotionally satisfying, given his penchant for the amusing anecdote, the plausible parallel, the ad hominem interjections, and the allusions to such contemporary subjects as "LA Law," Umberto Eco, and O. J. Simpson. Cicero is introduced less as a great advocate than as a successful practitioner of the art of "lawyering"; and resuscitated in our time, Cantor notes, Cicero would do as well teaching young students this careerist art as "the smoothie" hired away from Stanford to give the course on this subject, "Lawyering," at Cantor's university.	4
According to Cantor, what has expanded the science of the law beyond its technical and political confines has been the "penumbra doctrine," as Cantor calls it, which merges law with ethics and encourages irrelevant appeals to extralegal ideals and aspirations—exemplified not only by Cicero's bombast but also by inflammatory issues such as legalized abortion. Legal positivism and professional conventions deplore such deviation into social and moral questions; but of course this is precisely what legal historians have to investigate, to interpret, and of course to "imagine" for laymen whether of history or of the law. Indeed much of this book seems to be penumbral in this sense.	5
Nevertheless, while trying to satisfy emotions, Cantor also provides a comprehensive and up-to-date narrative of the history of Anglo-American law, with critical comparisons with the Romanist tradition of "Justinian law" [sic]. He carries the story of common law from Glanville down to the O. J. trial—from the "legal revolution" of the twelfth century down to the state of Anglo-American law in the 1990s. The first key figure is Bracton, who was the first to introduce theory (drawn mainly from Roman law but also scholasticism and Magna Carta) into the unruly growth of English custom. Bracton is characterized by Cantor, variously and imaginatively, as "a medieval Holmes," a plausible secondary character in a Hardy novel, and a prototype of a late-1960s student radical. After Bracton English law flowed on, cutting ever broadening social and cultural as well as legal channels on its way to its modern eminence. Not that Cantor is uncritical of the excesses of English legal tradition—"common law is not necessarily equated with freedom"—but for him it has become an extraordinarily strong and durable culture that is, by and large, not only Memorable but also (in the famous words of 1066 and All That) a Good Thing.	6
What gives coherence and continuity to this story and the primary link with Anglo-American law in the age of the internet is the judicial and constitutional "liberalism," which appears first in Bracton and Magna Carta and which is reinforced by quo warranto proceedings, parliamentary traditions, gentrification, Coke, the Glorious Revolution, Blackstone, and other familiar features of the Stubbsian paradigm. And what further reinforces this continuity has been the course of legal education and, despite its own growing excesses, the profession of law and lawyering.	7
This is the old Whig view, Stubbs with a dash of Dickens, but updated through modern scholarship and interpretations and reinforced by arguments about the "deep structure" and "deep culture" of the common law, which (concludes Cantor) still functions well in the globalizing world at millennium's end. Perhaps. But (thinking of the readership of this journal) how much of this is penumbral, how much the opining and imagining of an author devoted more, these days, to popularization than to scholarship?	8
Donald R. Kelley Rutgers University

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