Morton Horwitz

Morton J. Horwitz (born 1938) is an American legal historian and law professor at Harvard Law School, where he became the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History in 1981. His first book, The Transformation of American Law 1780-1860, published in 1977, argued that judges in the early nineteenth century allied themselves with a growing class of mercantile capitalists and reshaped legal rules in their favor, and it won the Bancroft Prize, the leading prize in American history. Its sequel, The Transformation of American Law 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy, examined critics of that earlier order, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe Pound, and Karl Llewellyn.