Morton Horwitz

Morton J. Horwitz (* 1938 ) is an American lawyer, legal historian and professor at Harvard Law School .

Horwitz earned his bachelor's degree from City College of New York and his master's degree from Harvard University in 1962 , where he received his doctorate in 1964. In 1967 he received his Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from Harvard Law School. In 1970 he became an associate professor there and in 1980 a professor. In 1981 he became Charles Warren Professor of American Law History . He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1993 .

He became known through his influential book The Transformation of American Law , which analyzed the development of law in the USA before the American Civil War from the perspective of class antagonisms and highlighted the role of the influence of capitalist-minded entrepreneurs on the development of the legal system. These promoted a laissez-faire attitude of the least possible legal regulation of the development of economic forces, which primarily served the economic interests of this class. As he wrote in the foreword, he was expressly opposed to a consensus school of American legal historians that determined the presentation in the 1950s. The book won the Bancroft Prize .

In the following volume, covering the period from 1870 to 1960, he presented how the classical system of legal interpretation that emerged in the second half of the 19th century , based on generally applicable objective principles, was increasingly criticized, and particularly Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. , Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn as part of the development of an alternative, realistic interpretation of law ( legal realism). One incision was the criticism of the Lochner vs. New York of the Supreme Court of 1905, in which the Supreme Court repealed a law restricting the working hours of bakers and thus occupational health and safety in New York because it was contrary to the freedom of profession, and the realistic school persisted until the time of the New Deal .

In another book, he describes the progressive development of the case law in the Supreme Court in the time of its chairman Earl Warren (1953 to 1969) from the point of view of Horwitz in the sense of the civil rights movement .

Fonts

• The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, Harvard University Press 1977
• The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, Oxford Paperbacks 1992
• The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice, Hill and Wang 1998

Web links

• Homepage
• Literature by and about Morton Horwitz in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ↑ According to the legal historian Eben Moglen, in the review of the following volume, the historiography of American law dominated for decades. Moglen The Transformation of Morton Horwitz , Columbia Law Review, 1993