In 1994, the legal scholar John Phillip Reid published a somewhat cynical article on forensic history in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. It contains some real zingers on the intersection between law and history, how practitioners of each perpetrate mutually abusive disciplinary transgressions, and the meaning (and substance) of forensic history. Here are … Continue reading A Mixture Containing More Snares Than Rewards
Tag: forensic research
Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined
I've been digging into the use of Pearl Harbor analogies in America's response to the 9-11 attacks - and, because of a curious twist in the political landscape in 2001, I've been looking a little more closely at a well known study of the Pearl Harbor attack, Roberta Wohlstetter's Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford … Continue reading Of which the essence thereafter remains unexamined
Framing Forensics
For the last few months, I've been thinking about how "forensics", "forensic research" or "forensic practice" are commonly understood. The interest is driven in part by long familiarity with the uses of historical methods and research to support very contemporary preoccupations, and the somewhat unusual conjoining of "forensic" and "history" as a single discipline. I … Continue reading Framing Forensics
