Among many of today's legal historians, there is a relatively new and generally unreflective understanding of the relationship between history and method. The landscape is everywhere marked by a tendency to eschew big thinking, grand theory, and programmatic approaches to historical explanation and social transformation. In the place of the grand theory approach to law and history, there is a preference for the minimalist, the pragmatic, the particularistic, and the quotidian. What this normal science of today's legal historiography makes obvious is a kind of attachment to particular kinds of problems with particular sorts of built-in solutions. The result for today is intellectual stagnation, a routinized and thoroughly domesticated mode of revealing contingency. Oddly, the fascination with contingency, and its deadening affair with a minimalist pragmatism, is itself a result of the triumph of what continues to be called “critical legal history.” Ostensibly due to an interface between critical legal studies and the historical discipline, the rise and triumph of critical legal history hides a secret: the whole idea of a reigning critical appreciation for contingency seems to be a misnomer. Sure, some may say that “things might have been otherwise.” But what this intellectual settlement demands is obedience to its qualification: “things might have been otherwise, but they weren't, and so let's get on with doing what works.” Although so-called critical legal history seduces adherents with promises of edgy progressivism, the actual malaise of our minimalism seems in fact to suggest just the opposite. It is a quiescent and even quietistic method in practice, counseling in its conservatism against higher-order proposals that might ever make good on the discovery that nothing is natural. In the end, either we must accept that critical legal history in the United States is a lot less politically explosive than we once thought—given its deradicalization and domestication today—or that people have been mistaken about what critical legal history was, is, and ought to be.

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2.关于关键法律历史的本土化

在今天的许多法律史学家中，对历史与方法之间的关系有一种相对较新的、通常不加反思的理解。到处都以回避大思想、宏大理论和历史解释和社会转型的程序化方法的趋势为特征。取而代之的是对法律和历史的宏大理论方法，偏爱极简主义、实用主义、特殊主义和日常。当今法律史学的这门常规科学表明，一种对特定类型问题的依恋和特定类型的内置解决方案。今天的结果是智力停滞，一种揭示偶然性的常规化和彻底驯化的模式。奇怪的是，对偶然性的迷恋，它与极简主义实用主义的沉闷关系本身就是继续被称为“批判法律史”的胜利的结果。表面上由于批判法律研究和历史学科之间的联系，批判法律史的兴起和胜利隐藏了一个秘密：对偶然性的普遍批判性欣赏的整个想法似乎用词不当。当然，有些人可能会说“事情本来可能不是这样”。但这种智力解决方案所要求的是服从其限定条件：“事情本来可能是另外一回事，但事实并非如此，所以让我们继续做有效的事情。” 尽管所谓的批判法律史以前卫的进步主义的承诺引诱追随者，但我们极简主义的实际不适似乎实际上表明恰恰相反。它在实践中是一种静止的甚至是安静的方法，以其保守的方式反对更高阶的建议，这些建议可能有助于发现没有什么是自然的。最后，要么我们必须接受美国的批判法律史在政治上的爆炸性比我们曾经想象的要小得多——考虑到它今天的去激进化和归化——或者人们已经误解了批判法律史是什么，是什么，以及必定是。