In 2020, James Oldham, the St. Thomas More Professor of Law and Legal History at the Georgetown University Law Center, took emeritus status after fifty years on the faculty. Professor Oldham’s career as a legal historian commenced when, curious about the continued presence of Lord Mansfield in Contract casebooks, he devoted a sabbatical to locating sources on the great English judge. His search broadened into a pursuit of almost the whole of English legal history in the age of George III, resulting in scores of articles, book chapters, and books. Highlights include a Selden Society lecture at Lincoln’s Inn (The Varied Life of the Self-Informing Jury); the receipt of the Sutherland Prize of the American Society for Legal History for “Informal Lawmaking in England by the Twelve Judges in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” Law and History Review 29 (2011): 181-220; and the publication by the Selden Society of Case Notes of Sir Soulden Lawrence, 1787-1800 (2013).
Above all, Professor Oldham is known for The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century (1992), his transcription of thirty years of Mansfield’s trial notes, supplemented by his own essays, which he later revised and published as English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield (2004). One reviewer called the nearly 1700-page Mansfield Manuscripts a “marvelous compilation–filled out by exhaustive work amongst the printed and manuscript reports the courts, newspapers and periodicals of the era, and the private manuscript collections of contemporaries.”[1] Reviewers recognized that the book would “be regarded as the definitive assessment of Mansfield’s influence” but also that it illuminated much more than the life and work of a single judge.[2] “There exists no comparable source for a detailed and precisely stated study of the development of the substantive law during the Mansfield years,” a reviewer wrote.[3] “Anyone in need of information on a topic in eighteenth-century English law would be well advised to consult these essays,” Susan Staves, a professor of English literature, counseled, because they were so “accessible to the general historian.”[4] Concluded A.W.B. Simpson: “Professor Oldham has made a major contribution to the history of the common law.”[5]
The COVID-19 pandemic delayed a suitable recognition of Professor Oldham’s career until January 2023, when a dozen scholars gathered at Georgetown Law for the symposium, “James Oldham: The Love and Labor of Archival Research.” Participants were asked to assess Professor Oldham’s publications on one or more of three topics: (1) The Jury; (2) Commerce: Arbitration, Insurance, Contracts; and (3) Judges and Law Reporting. (A list of those publications appears here.) Although participants were not required to prepare written comments, several turned up with thoughtful, well-articulated assessments of Professor Oldham’s personal and scholarly contributions to English legal history. I thought that other legal historians might benefit from reading them; Gautham Rao, the Editor-in-Chief of Law and History Review agreed; and this symposium is the result. R. H. Helmholz, Renée Lettow Lerner, and Paul Halliday address Professor Oldham’s scholarship on juries. Emily Kadens and Michael Lobban comment on his scholarship on Commerce. Christian Burset and Catherine MacMillan speak to his scholarship on judges and law reporting. I thank all of the legal historians who participated in the symposium and especially Professor Kadens for her encouragement and advice in planning the symposium. I also thank Dean William Treanor for his support and participation in the symposium and the dinner that followed.
[1] Simon Devereaux, review of English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield, H-Albion (June 2005). https://networks.h-net.org/node/16749/reviews/17910/devereaux-oldham-english-common-law-age-mansfield
[2] Philip Schofield, review of The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, Journal of Legal History 19 (1995): 107.
[3] Henry J. Bourguignon, review of The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, Law and History Review 12 (1994): 195.
[4] Susan Staves, review of The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (1994): 274.
[5] A. W. Brian Simpson, review of The Mansfield Manuscripts and the Growth of English Law in the Eighteenth Century, Albion 25 (1993): 322.