Issue: Volume 1, Issue 3 (October 2018): A Tribute to the Scholarship of Robert W. Gordon

On January 12, 2018, on a Friday afternoon in Palo Alto, California, a number of the United States’ leading legal historians converged on Stanford Law School to discuss a major new work, Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law. They also traveled from throughout the country to celebrate the book’s…

Editor’s Note: This is an edited transcript of remarks prepared and delivered at Stanford University’s Center for Law and History on January 12, 2018. Amalia Kessler: Well, it’s really such a pleasure to see you all here for what we have been affectionately calling BobFest. So let me just first say our dean, Liz Magill,…

Professor Robert W. Gordon is the author of dozens of books and articles.  The following is only a selective bibliography.  Readers will find a complete list of his publications on his curriculum vitae, available on his Stanford Law School faculty page. BOOKS Taming the Past: Essays on Law in History and History in Law. Cambridge…

“As we all know well, Gordon has done a tremendous amount to bring historiography, and particularly critical historicism, into the fortress of law and legal history….. But Gordon has also played a key role in sending traffic out of the fortress and across the moat, in bringing legal sophistication to ‘general historiography’.”

For more than a generation, students have learned what legal history is or can be by reading the essays of Bob Gordon.

In this “toast,” I’d like to say a few words about two of the three words in this panel’s title: Bob Gordon as mensch and Bob Gordon as theoretician. If you’re an untidy character like me, your email inbox probably has many years’ worth of mail in it. One great advantage of this is that…

Editor’s Note: Several scholars offered tributes to Robert Gordon outside of the formal program; we present them here. Bob Gordon and the Field Guide to Dragons, Their Varieties and Habitats Richard J. Ross and Steven Wilf We are meeting to celebrate Bob Gordon, his storied career, and the issuing of a collection of his essays, entitled,…

Here is Bob in his own words, adding a more personal reflection and commentary to his more formal publications and presentations…. illuminating the ideas and biography of one of the most influential and much-loved legal historians of the last fifty years…. Hopefully, it conveys the spirit of our dialogue, and, among other things, what a good time we were having.