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The Declaration and its Discontents
This review was originally published on June 27, 2022 on my personal blog. A shorted version of it was also published in the Florida Bar Journal’s Sept/Oct 2022 issue. Review of Stuart Banner, The Decline of Natural Law: How American Lawyers Once Used Natural Law and Why They Stopped, Oxford University Press, 2021. “We hold these…
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Legal history for lawyers, by a lawyer
While I was in law school, I was surprised at how little explaination there was about why things were the way they are and how the institutions we were training to operate in came to be the way they were. It was all the more surprising when we would read an old opinion that would cite to someone like Justinian or Pufendorf (I’m looking at you, Pierson v. Post). I knew who Justinian was because I knew my history, but the other fellow?
These were natural questions for me, perhaps, as I’d studied history in undergrad and spent a few years as a middle and high school history teacher before coming to law school. And, given the opportunity to add a master’s degree in American History during my time at the University of Florida, I studied and read as much legal history as I could to give breadth and depth to my legal studies. As I entered the legal profession, I continued to read and write about it, and now have set aside this space as a place to more intentionally write about the subject–with an eye towards the lawyer with a keen interest in the history of law and profession.
Ryan Tindall
Historian and Lawyer
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