Legal Scholarship Symposium: The Scholarship of Lawrence M. Friedman

Lawrence M. Friedman has achieved a singular preeminence as a legal historian for articulating a new vision of legal history as a discipline in his 1973 work entitled A History of American Law. This book treats American law as a mirror of society. At the time, Friedman\u27s vision was still something quite new in American legal historiography. James Willard Hurst\u27s notions of legal history as a sociolegal inquiry would heavily influence Friedman, helping to move the field into new and often surprising precincts. Friedman\u27s approach to legal history is one that introduced us to previously unexamined actors and institutions.Whether looking at criminal justice in the limited context of late nineteenth-century Alameda County or giving us a broad overview of criminal law and its administration across the broad sweep of the nation\u27s history, Friedman makes an important contribution precisely because of his ability to integrate the legal and the social. Crime and society\u27s responses to crime involve law with the society\u27s broader culture in a way that no other area of the law can. At its base, criminal law and its administration involve fundamental questions of a society\u27s moral vision and the mobilization of the public behind that vision. It also deeply involves questions of social hierarchy and power. These are legal questions, but behind those legal questions stand powerful questions concerning a society and its culture. The history of American criminal law has benefited greatly from having Friedman apply his skilled law and society lens to a once neglected field in legal history