The variety of legal history published in general-interest law journals tends to differ from the variety published in history journals. This study compares the two varieties by examining footnote references in five general-interest law journals and footnote references in two journals of legal history. In the law journals, cases and statutes accounted for the single largest group of footnotes (approximately 35%), followed by references to other law journal articles (nearly 25%). In the legal history journals, these two categories accounted for less than 20% of all references; primary and secondary historical materials predominated in the footnotes. To be sure, legal decisions and law journal articles can also be historical sources: rather than being used as evidence of what the law is, they might be studied for what they reveal about legal reasoning or rhetoric in an earlier age. However, in most legal historical research that attends primarily to cases and statutes, these materials figure as evidence of the state of the law at that time. When the analysis relies on legal sources to trace the development of a certain doctrine and treats them as sufficient to account for that development, the result is the distinctive style of research that I seek to contrast against approaches that cast the net of historical inquiry more widely. To account for these different approaches, I suggest that law professors rely on a notion of proximate causation as a historiographic method. According to this approach, legal developments are proximately caused by other developments in the legal sphere, and other social and cultural developments play more attenuated roles, such that their influence is less significant. By proposing this explanation, I hope to draw more attention to assumptions about causation in legal historiography and to question their persuasive force.

中文翻译：

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6. 法律史学中的直接因果关系

在一般利益法期刊上发表的法律史种类往往与在历史期刊上发表的种类不同。本研究通过检查五份一般利益法期刊中的脚注参考资料和两份法律史期刊中的脚注参考资料来比较这两种变体。在法律期刊中，案例和法规占脚注的最大群体（约 35%），其次是对其他法律期刊文章的引用（近 25%）。在法律史期刊中，这两个类别占所有参考文献的比例不到20%；主要和次要的历史材料在脚注中占主导地位。可以肯定的是，法律决定和法律期刊文章也可以是历史来源：而不是被用作法律是什么的证据，他们可能会因为他们在较早时期揭示的有关法律推理或修辞的内容而受到研究。然而，在大多数以案例和法规为主的法律史研究中，这些材料都被视为当时法律状况的证据。当分析依赖于法律来源来追踪某个学说的发展并将其视为足以解释该发展时，结果是我试图与更广泛地撒下历史调查网络的方法形成鲜明对比的研究风格. 为了解释这些不同的方法，我建议法学教授依赖近似因果关系的概念作为一种史学方法。根据这种方法，法律发展是由法律领域的其他发展直接引起的，和其他社会和文化发展的作用更弱，因此它们的影响不那么重要。通过提出这个解释，我希望引起人们对法律史学中因果关系假设的更多关注，并质疑它们的说服力。