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J. Horwitz is Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard
Law School. He is author of the widely acclaimed studies, The Transformation
of American Law, 1780–1860 and The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960:
The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, as well as numerous articles. His commitment
to interdisciplinary thinking has made his work familiar to scholars in
many different fields. A cultural critic as well as a legal historian,
Horwitz is interested in the crossroads of law, intellectual life, historical
narrative, science, and art, and has illustrated how these ostensibly separate
disciplines interact to form and inform patterns of cultural evolution.
The following discussion begins with issues that Horwitz deals with in
a Harvard Law Review foreword, "The Constitution of Change: Legal Fundamentality
Without Fundamentalism." In this article, Horwitz sharply criticizes the
current Supreme Court's tendency toward "color blindness" and static interpretations
of the constitution, arguing for a theory of "a changing constitution that
is capable of combining classical ideas of fundamental law with modernist
conceptions of dynamic change." Horwitz's polemic is primarily directed
against recent decisions in which the Court "wished away existing racial
realities" by employing race-neutral principles. Horwitz contends that
a history of racial injustice cannot be remedied by the insistence, now,
on a race-neutral constitution. By carefully distinguishing between the
concepts of preservation and regression, Horwitz proposes that there is
a way to balance preservation with transformation, which in turn suggests
a potentially progressive role for the past, or history, in today's modern
world.
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Morton Horwitz
Law and Civility Kim Anne Savelson
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