Santayana and Twain . . .

"The American philosopher George Santayana once wrote that '[t]hose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it'--implying, perhaps, that if we educate ourselves, we can escape the destinies that our ancestors have woven for

us. This is not true, of course. If only it were. Life would be easier if we could use the lessons of history to predict the future, and thus to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. But as the humorist Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) once observed: "History doesn't repeat itself-at best it sometimes rhymes." Like poetry, history is enigmatic: it asks more questions than it answers. Is 2006 likely to resemble 1976, with a guerrilla war behind us but economic misery ahead in the forms of high inflation (or more likely, a declining dollar), high energy prices, and stagnating wages? What about 1926--the height of that experiment in public morality known as 'Prohibition'--when our enchantment with 'borrow and spend' paved the way for the crash and the depression to come? Or are we living in the midst of another Gilded Age, as in 1896, when businesses were consolidating, labor unions were flexing their muscles, and wealth was becoming more concentrated in the hands of a few? Might the answer be 'all of the above'?"

Sara K. Stadler, The Bulls and Bears of Law Teaching, 63 W&L L. Rev.25, 43 (2006).

I'm always happy to see law professors delving into history, and some really good history has been written by law professors, but the problem is that most law professors believe in themselves so much that they think they can write about history as capably, or more so, than historians. Even in legal history, that is not correct, in my view. The historian's education and methods are frequently better suited to finding and explaining the past than the training and methods of a teacher of law.

I will have more to say about Santayana, whose quotation above I like, and about this apocryphal Twain "saying."

"Rarely does history provide an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, but it does at least two other things . . . "

"Rarely does history provide an obvious road map to solving new legal problems, but it does at least two other things well: (1) it helps explain why the legal landscape looks the way it does; and (2) it illuminates the consequences of particular legal choices. This makes all the more valuable recent historical work that engages with political economy. We gain from this work a better sense of the political economies that produced our current configuration of laws. We also gain insights into how law constructs the political economy of the future—by sending signals about who will be insulated from the vicissitudes of “the market” and who will be exposed, whose rights can be bargained away and whose are too sacred, whose lives have value and whose do not."

More complicated than most states, the history of Texas . . .

"With the variety of granting systems in Texas under several different forms of government, timing is critical along with the history of the formation of the state, in order to understand the origin and development of a tract of land. More complicated than most states, the history of Texas serves as an important example of the importance of the history of a territory and the changes in its laws and policies over time . . . . Texas is no doubt more complex than most."

-Donald A. Wilson, Boundary Retracement: Processes and Procedures at 347-48 (2017).

Per D.W. Meinig, "The principal organizing system is chronology . . . "

"The principal organizing system is chronology, which is not in itself history but the scaffold upon which one constructs history. . . . [A]ny historical view clearly  implies a belief that the past has fundamental significance, one aspect of which is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked: the powerful fact that life must be lived amidst that which was made before. . . . The past endures . . . ."

-D.W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene," in D.W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays at 43 (1979).