John Phillip Reid has died.
http://legalhistoryblog.blogspot.com/2022/04/john-phillip-reid.html
My acquaintance with him is regrettably slight, a result of my frequent attendance of the annual meetings of the American Society for Legal History, where I found him to be entirely approachable and willing to talk about any aspect of legal history. I wish I had known him better as he has been one of the preeminent legal historians at work during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. I like his books The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty (Northern Illinois University Press, 2005) and Rule of Law: The Jurisprudence of Liberty in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (same press, 2004).
I have quoted and cited Professor Reid, who taught forever at NYU Law School, for the concept of "forensic history" that he defined as: “a species of history that does not meet the canons of historians’ history . . . .” Also calling it “law office history,” Reid posited that such history is, probably because it is advocacy-oriented, unlikely to be good history:
[t]he forensic historian . . . searches the past for material applicable to a current issue. The purpose of the advocate, unlike that of the historian, is to use the past for the elucidation of the present, to solve some contemporary problem or, most often, to carry an argument.
Reid even included the U.S. Supreme Court as a practitioner of law office history.
Thanks to my friend Richard F. Bernstein for this:
A good brief analysis appears in John Phillip Reid, "Law and History," 27 Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 193-223 (1993). Another, which responds to [J.G.A.] Pocock's The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law is John Phillip Reid, "The Jurisprudence of Liberty: The Ancient Constitution in the Legal Historiography of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries" at 147-231 (notes at 292-320) in Ellis Sandoz, ed., The Roots of Liberty: Magna Carta, The Ancient Constitution, and the Anglo-American Tradition of Rule of Law (1993).
I think Reid was trying to make the cautionary point that we study the past for its own sake and that when we seek to "apply" history to current events and problems, we must proceed carefully.
Point taken.
Rest in peace, Professor Reid.