In Fall 1978, Stanley N. Katz joined Princeton University’s History department as the inaugural Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty and began teaching a course on U.S. legal history.Footnote ¹ The course turned out to be a big draw among the undergraduates, filling a large auditorium and eclipsing enrollments in other history courses. It also had an out-sized curricular impact on faculty and graduate students who were the members of the teaching team. It was not a lecture course—and therein lies a tale.

History 385’s motivating ideal was that students would get for themselves a profound appreciation for “the role of law in American society.” And indeed, the course went by that title. Rather than chronicling historical developments in the very broad arena that constitutes U.S. law, Katz organized the course around four, in-depth topical units. Each explored a different bundle of legal and ethical issues. Students read a wide range of legal sources and almost no secondary sources. The teaching team (Katz and preceptors) compiled the assigned materials themselves (in the early years, via mimeograph machines) to give out to students since published versions rarely existed.Footnote ² A central goal was to enable students to discover the methods, sources, and key questions that historians pursue—and thus, to “do” legal history themselves.Footnote ³ Princeton History faculty member Sean Wilentz remembers it as “a master course in how to think historically, through the prism of law.”Footnote ⁴ A final key ingredient in Katz’s vision was that the course, no matter how big the enrollment, proceed by discussion, not by one-way lecture.

Katz was hardly the only history faculty member in the United States in the 1970s to focus on primary sources and thereby challenge students to develop their own analytical questions and interpretations. But this approach was not nearly as widespread as it is today. Indeed, Katz saw himself as evangelizing among his Princeton colleagues and students to convince them of how exciting and effective it could be to abandon both lecturing and the goal of coverage.

Katz credits the University of Wisconsin Laboratory Course in American History as the key model for H385. In Fall 1965, Katz joined the History department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as an assistant professor. In the following summer, he was recruited by his colleagues William R. Taylor, Eric Lampard, and Merle Curti to be one of the many instructors teaching an experimental course to be offered for the first time in the Fall. A grant from what was then the Office of Education made possible paid faculty preparation time and more staffing than would be the norm.

The year-long UW’s laboratory course was designed as a “radical departure” from the usual introductory U.S. history survey in which lectures proceed chronologically and students encounter few opportunities to pause and explore something in depth.Footnote ⁵ The course deliberately abandoned the goal of “coverage” of a broad chronology in favor of a highly selective, post-hole approach. In other words, the emphasis was on developing a sense of historical understanding rather than learning a narrative. In UW’s Laboratory course, students attended only an occasional lecture; typically, they met twice a week in small groups, working with the primary source materials in graduated stages, and writing a paper every two weeks. The materials for the first half of Fall semester consisted of the existing documentation of the Salem witchcraft trials in 1692. In the rest of the semester, students pored over the sources of the Fourierist Phalanx, an 1840’s utopian community in Wisconsin. In Spring semester, students immersed themselves in the records of a lower east side New York City settlement society or another twentieth-century collection. Except for the seventeenth-century Salem module, these manuscript records were housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society, located on the UWM campus; Lab course students could consult them there or via microfilm.Footnote ⁶

In enabling the doing-of-history, the UW’s Laboratory course fits into the genre of a hands-on, research course—except that it was taught on much grander scale than might be expected. Katz’s Princeton course on legal history built on it, but it was not a clone. Just as important was Katz’s exposure through the 1960s and 1970s to many different styles of teaching and approaching legal history, a crucible from which he emerged with a particular vision. Katz began to implement that vision when he used the Socratic method to teach American legal history to roughly 100 students each semester after he became a faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School in 1971. Seven years later, when the opportunity arose, he made the move to Princeton largely because his primary desire was to teach and work with undergraduates.

In his scholarly writing, Katz was a part of a movement to think very broadly about law. In 1966, he issued a call for legal historians to examine “the law in its actual relation to social and economic process through the systematic exploration of … legislative and administrative records, economic and social data, and the records of lower courts and ordinary lawyers.”Footnote ⁷ Like others of his generation, he was heavily influenced by J. Willard Hurst who argued for “reaching out” beyond the history of appellate courts and legal doctrine to embrace legislation, policy implementation, and local rule-making as key aspects of law.Footnote ⁸ This approach was also instrumental in his teaching. For Katz, implementing this meant teaching entirely differently from traditionalists like Mark DeWolfe Howe who focused on Anglo-American developments and traced a Whig arc from the Magna Carta to the American Revolution and beyond. Howe’s teaching materials, Katz recalled, were “heavily Massachusetts-centric.”Footnote ⁹ Stan’s legal history course would not be about the storied emergence of the putatively benevolent rule of Anglo-American law.

On Day One, students taking History 385 were alerted that this was a different sort of course: there was no syllabus. Instead, they received a thick ream of double-sided pages, for which the cover sheet read: “Readings: History 385, … Mr. Katz.” Page two named the four topical units, starting with The Criminal Law of Slavery and ending with The Desegregation of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas (1956–1958). (All the course materials were in the bulky handout.) From then on, as a student you went with the flow, unguided by a written-out calendar; Prof. Katz announced at the end of each class which cases or items students should be prepared to discuss in the next session.

Of course, there was an immense amount of work behind the identification, selection, and preparation of the materials. Katz brought the slavery unit from his previous teaching: it featured North Carolina appellate rulings in cases in which an enslaved person allegedly killed or harmed their enslaver or vice versa.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, the readings dramatized the contradictions that arose when a legal system treated the persons belonging to one caste as both property (for the purposes of civil and probate law) and sentient human beings (in criminal law). A central figure was Justice Thomas Ruffin (Princeton Class of 1805). After students became familiar with Ruffin’s and other justices’ rulings, they were challenged on the final examination to analyze certain specifics of Ruffin’s judicial reasoning from his point of view “or from an alternative stance based on similar principles.”

Other units built on the spade work of other scholars: a unit on Law and Economic Development in the Early Nineteenth Century drew on Morton Horwitz’s influential analysis of riparian rights case related to mills and early negligence cases related to corporations.Footnote ¹¹ By 1982, Stan had swapped out one unit with a new one that I developed under his guidance as a summer research assistant;Footnote ¹² it traces how British and American case law slowly diverged on child custody and paved the way, in the U.S., for state laws enabling adoption. Constructing this unit was possible because of Jamil Zainaldin’s lucid research article on the topic.Footnote ¹³

Most memorable among H385’s units for many former students recalling the course years later was the immersive one on the desegregation crisis at Little Rock, which Katz called a “micro-study examining a test case” (Brown v. Board of Education) and its impact on a community.Footnote ¹⁴ On the ground, how does constitutional law work in terms of social process? The unit materials contained not just the two Supreme Court decisions and other state and federal cases relating to desegregation in Arkansas, but also some very distinctive material. In the 1960s, Stan had been part of a team of University of Wisconsin scholars who traveled to Little Rock and persuaded Daisy Bates, the state-wide NAACP President in the 1950s, to donate her papers to the Wisconsin Historical Society.Footnote ¹⁵ Large chunks of these papers were used in the UW Madison Laboratory course and later in Katz’s H385. They included transcripts of almost daily phone calls between Bates and the national NAACP leadership and Central High School internal reports on the daily experiences of Black students such as Carlotta Walls, Minniejean Brown, and Elizabeth Eckford.Footnote ¹⁶ Katz stressed getting to know—besides the speeches of Gov. Faubus—the many local actors, the demographics, the stance of leaders of Black churches, and the positions of school board and the Chamber of Commerce members.

In prepping students for the open book final examination, Katz instructed students to ponder the course’s big question: in each of the four units, what was the relationship between law (in the guise of its many players) and social change? “Have your own view,” Katz emphasized.Footnote ¹⁷

At its first outing, in Fall, 1978, H385 attracted 61 students, which was not atypical of U.S. History course enrollments. The next year witnessed a big spike (to 253), and, since there were no available classrooms with over 150 seats, two sections were offered, with Katz facilitating one and legal historian Douglas Greenberg meeting the other at the same time in another large classroom.Footnote ¹⁸ This may not seem like a large enrollment, but for Princeton at that time it was striking.Footnote ¹⁹

The course had a pedagogical impact, too. In the mid-1980s, the distinctive Princeton custom of having faculty members routinely precept for one another was still in place, and that meant that the distinguished mid-career historians William Chester Jordan (medievalist) and James McPherson (U.S. Civil War era), and the newly hired assistant professors Sean Wilentz and Christine Stansell, precepted for H385. Katz’s evangelizing among his colleagues to teach largely with primary sources convinced McPherson, who retooled his Civil War class accordingly.Footnote ²⁰ In 1986, the department launched a Katz-initiated, co-taught course, H280, Approaches to American History, initially led by Daniel T. Rodgers and Sean Wilentz, which aimed to immerse second-year undergraduates in a document-based historical interpretation, prior to their tackling senior thesis projects. H280 is still taught at Princeton today and has inspired similar courses in the fields of European and Asian history.Footnote ²¹

Many who took H385 became lawyers, policy experts, leaders of nonprofits, and academics. One wonders how this intense course interacted with their other experiences to shape them after college—especially in terms of how they thought about law, practiced law, implemented policy, or taught. Cathy Klema remembers what a surprise it was at the time: “it was unlike any other course I took in college” and offered “a fascinating introduction into how American law reflects—or doesn’t reflect—the values of American society.” Michael W. Klein reflects that “the sheer volume of our readings” (752 pages) “maybe didn’t intimidate me at the time, but [it] does now!” Historian Eliga Gould explains that the hook for him “was the way Stan combined legal history and the history of ideas with social and political history.” “All four [units] have had a tremendous impact on how I think about the law and legal history to this day.”Footnote ²²

Teachers and preceptors of the Princeton course have detailed memories of the course and its distinctiveness, often because ever after they taught their own versions of H385, with Stan’s blessing, at other universities. Of course, we asked ourselves if we could ever pull it off nearly as well as Stan did. Louis Masur writes that “class after class, Katz would push and prod and challenge students to unpack the cases and connect them.” He “was the master conductor, calling for a bit more here, a change of direction there. It was symphonic.” And “the results” in terms of excited student engagement “were stunning.”Footnote ²³ Doug Greenberg, who had taught successfully at Lawrence University before coming to Princeton, wrote that “I thought I knew what I was doing. But nothing had prepared me for something so very different and challenging. Having a discussion with [close to] 200 students about primary sources” required a special nimbleness: “I had to listen quite carefully to the students and they had to listen carefully to each other. Everyone had to adapt quickly to the direction the discussion took. Teaching History 385 was transformative for me, both intellectually and personally. I never taught a pure lecture course again.”Footnote ²⁴

Katz gets the last word. One evening in 2007 at a two-day conference held at Princeton to honor his multi-faceted career, he declared in his formal remarks to the big crowd: “This is my now 50^th year of teaching [and] I have had more fun teaching this year than I did when I began in 1957. How fortunate I am!”Footnote ²⁵ Since then, not only has he continued to teach, but also the ripples emanating from H385, the beloved legal history course he pulled together and that others have kept improvising on, endure.