I second Jacob’s recommendation of Harold Berman’s masterpiece, Law and Revolution. I was a student of Berman at Harvard in his course The Western Legal Tradition, and we read an early manuscript of Law and Revolution which at the time was sort of infamous for being unpublished for so long. I believe I wrote a seminar paper on the lessons it taught about competitive legal systems–the precursor of work I did much later on polycentric legal ordering. I am pleased to learn there will be another volume. Berman is a truly wonderful man, and he took something like 20 years to write volume one. It has probably been that long since it appeared, so volume two could be just as well done.
I guess with having had for teachers, along with Harold Berman, Ronald Dworkin for Jurisprudence (with whom I also did an independent study critiquing the chapter of Taking Rights Seriously in which he argued against a general right to liberty), Roberto Unger for Contracts, Morton Horowitz for Legal History, Larry Tribe for Constitutional Law, Alan Dershowitz and Alan Stone for Prediction & Prevention of Harmful Conduct, Frank Michelman for Property, and Charles Fried for Torts, I got my money’s worth at Harvard. (And it was a lot cheaper back then.) I even saw Lon Fuller give a guest lecture in a Law and Religion class I took, and later he invited me over to his home in Cambridge for tea.
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