Law 6226, Final question #2

Pick one of the sections of the course that we have covered since the midterm (that is, one of the sections from Martin v. Massachusetts on) and write an essay explaining how you would write a legal history of that section. (You may focus your essay on a particular document in that section, or in the section as a whole. That is, you might write an essay using explaining how you would write a legal history of puritan Massachusetts Bay by focusing either on the Charter for Massachusetts Bay or on all the documents we read in the first two weeks of class.)

As this should suggest, your task is not to analyze a document, or collection of documents, directly. Rather, it is to explain how you would write a history book (or learned article) that made the main points of a document or section clear. You will need, therefore, to consider several things in writing your essay:

1. The issues raised in the section you chose, and why they are important (ie, you need to answer the question: Why should anyone care about this history?).
2. The document or documents that make those issues most clear, and which, therefore, will form the heart of your history.
3. The things you would need to know in order to tell the history you wish to tell. (Here, it is important to note that I do not intend to have you do additional research on the background of the documents you deal with. You need only tell me what you would want to look for, and why it would be important. To again use Massachusetts Bay as an example, you might decide you want to focus your history on Winthrop’s “Little Speech on Liberty.” You decide that your history will tell the story that led up to the speech, so in your essay you will explain to me why you think that is the best perspective, and what you want to focus on to tell that story. There are, obviously, several ways of going about it. You might want to tell a story of Winthrop’s life. You might feel you could explain the significance of that speech best if you contrasted it to other documents, and any other materials you could find from that period in which there were discussions of the word liberty. Or you might want to focus on the impeachment trial of Winthrop and use that to set up the background. What I want is to know what you think you need to look into, and why you think what you are looking for is important.)
4. The other issues and documents from outside that section which might help shed light on the importance of the issues you want to discuss. (Think of the midterm, for example, where you used documents to help explain Federalist 78. Many of you, properly, used a wide variety of documents from different periods in order to illuminate the points you wanted to make, here you need to think about the same thing.)

The best way to think of this is that it is as if, based on a single interview or a memo or a document, you had to prepare a memo outlining a possible trial strategy for a case. In that memo, you would explain what you thought was important about the interview, memo, or document. You would explain how you might best make those important things obvious to a judge or jury, and, in order to explain your ideas persuasively to whoever read your memo (a senior partner?), you would have to explain how all your ideas fit together and show why your approach was best.

You may want to use the books we have read and will read as models. Think about which ones were most interesting in explaining the things they explained, and think about how you might borrow and convert those interesting ideas to fit your project.

You should note that your performance on this assignment benefits from your paying attention to the things that will come up in class. For one thing, some of the materials we have dealt with so far make best sense if read in light of materials we haven’t gotten to yet. For another thing, the later books may help you think things through. The point of this last point is, obviously, that answers to this question that reveal their authors checked out of the class on or about April 1 will not be warmly received.

Your essay should be roughly 7 pages long. Less than 5 pages is too short, longer than 10 pages (unless your idea for a history is brilliant) is too long. Once again, graduating seniors should be careful to indicate obviously that they are graduating seniors somewhere on the essay, preferably in a place I don’t miss.