Search results for ""Author Richard A. Cosgrove""

Law has been the missing link in modern British studies. Richard Cosgrove has begun single-handedly to change that. In unpretentious prose Cosgrove expertly guides the reader through the major works of half a dozen 'greats' as well as shrewdly assessing their current reputations. Scholars of the Law should inspire many more! --John V. Orth, The University of North Carolina School of Law Richard Cosgrove's Scholars of the Law begins with the emergence of the positivist belief that jurisprudence can solve the important social issues of the day. Legal theory in the twentieth century has become narrow and abstract, and contemporary theory, ever anxious to debunk elitism, ironically has become elitist itself. Charting the history of English jurisprudence through its key figures--William Blackstone, Jeremy Bentham, John Austin, Henry Maine, Thomas Erskine Holland, and H. L. A. Hart--Richard Cosgrove argues that jurisprudence must return to its interdisciplinary roots and draw upon economics, politics, and sociology. In short, theory and practice must be recombined.

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The Great Tradition traces the way in which English constitutional history became a major factor in the development of a national identity that took for granted the superiority of the English as a governing race. In the United States, constitutional history also became an aspect of the United States's self-definition as a nation governed by law. The book's importance lies in the way constitutional history interpreted the past to create a favorable self-image for each country. It deals with constitutional history as a justification for empire, a model for the emergent academic history of the 1870s, a surrogate for political argument in the guise of scholarship, and an element that contributed to the Anglo-American rapprochement before World War I. The book also traces the rise and decline of constitutional history as a fashionable sub-discipline within the academy.

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