Albert Sonntag’s Legal Blog

“Why I am also an Historian”

By way of introduction, I note that I have spent a lot of my life studying Law and History. It has been a happy marriage of disciplines. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said as follows: “The life of the law is not logic, but experience.” The life of the law is its history, and in History lies the life of the law. As opposed to the Latin American countries, and at least one state of the Union, Louisiana, our law is based largely on precedent. Laws have a life in history, and they change on a daily basis, by way of the innumerable rulings and decisions of the courts. Every time a lawyer searches for the appropriate rule of law in a case, she is undertaking the task of an historian. She must seek out the history of every law to make sure it is still valid, and to ascertain that the earlier sets of facts coincide in some manner with those of her own case. Conversely, an historian also must act as a lawyer. He must always make a case, which is to put forward a thesis sustained and argued on the basis of fact. When an historian marshals information to support his case, he is undertaking the task of a lawyer. It is a perfect symbiosis of two very different approaches, serving two very different professions, but on the basis of a common technique.

I post this to introduce myself and my firm to colleagues and prospective clients, and to forecast my overall comparative and eclectic approach to legal practice. For every set of facts in my particular field, for example, I develop an advocate’s brief to support my client’s position, the challenge being to find the precise rule of law that will uphold the argument of that brief. Every case, from its inception, must be prepared as if it was being readied for presentation to judge and jury. Discovery will then be governed by the evidence required to make that argument. To repeat: I have found that the marriage of law and history is a most convenient and useful one. Call me a fool, but I’m still happy. I cannot envision a divorce!