AMERICANIZATION OF THE COMMON LAW: THE INTELLECTUAL MIGRATION MEETS THE GREAT MIGRATION.

Americanization of the Common Law, the first of many significant monographs that William E. Nelson has produced in his career, redirected the writing of American legal history by demonstrating the explanatory power of using a comprehensive archival database to pose, test, and advance hypotheses about legal change. Nelson had been trained to appreciate such a methodology while a graduate student at Harvard University, where his mentor Bernard Bailyn had begun his own academic career with studies that aggregated large amounts of data from which to draw and test creative hypotheses about Early American social and economic change. In the work of both scholars we can see how a powerful "Intellectual Migration"--that of particular German social scientists who found welcome in the United States in the 1930s--transformed scholarly writing about the changes that overtook New England following the "Great Migration" of three centuries earlier--that of the Puritan founders of New England. The methods of aggregating legal usage that Nelson employed in Americanization, and then put to use in Conflict and Dispute Resolution in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1725-1825, have survived and transcended the historiographical debates of the 1970s and transformed the writing of Early American legal history [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]