Fingerprints And Fragments: Reflections on the Challenges and Contributions of Socio-Legal History

To narrate law’s past, legal history depends on archives. Yet law’s archive, developed to serve law, necessarily dictates history’s terms. Critical legal history challenges this relationship. Inspired by trends in subaltern and postcolonial studies, critical legal historians push back against the dominance of doctrine. They bring the complexities of context and the vagaries of society, economy, and politics to bear on law’s story, framing law as part of, not separate from, history. To do this, critical legal historians challenge law’s archive. They interrogate what is said and what remains unsaid in the written record. They articulate the role that bureaucracy and recordkeeping play in upholding and maintaining law’s power. And they read legal sources in new ways to place doctrine in line with practice and to situate law within society. Scaling up from fingerprints and archival fragments to the study of legal history as a field, this article outlines how trends in socio-legal studies have contributed to the study of law’s past and articulates the challenges that remain.