William Forbath, Lloyd M. Bentsen Chair in Law at the University of Texas School of Law and a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, will be a guest contributor at Legal History Blog during September 2010. Legal History Blog covers “scholarship, news, and new ideas in legal history.”
“This new assignment brought to mind a contrast: the informality of blogging and the formality of legal history writing,” Forbath said. “We legal historians seem more reticent than others when it comes to writing about the personal—autobiographical, lived, or felt—side of our work. Lately, I’ve found myself getting a bit more personal. A few recent talks and essays have broached themes that are close to home. They are short and in many ways, informal. None of them, happily, is about me. The characters are a lot more interesting, but the elements of self-reflection and self-recognition—and in one case, of personal friendship and intimate knowledge—are pretty clear.”
His first entry, “The Personal and the Historical,” was posted September 8.
Forbath is the author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (Harvard, 1991), the forthcoming Social and Economic Rights in the American Grain and Courting the State: Law in the Making of the Modern American State and about one hundred articles, book chapters, and essays on legal and constitutional history and theory.