Page 22 - NYLS Magazine • 2015 • Vol. 34, No. 1

Thirty Years of Continuity and Change
20 New York Law schooL magaziNe • 2015 • VOL. 34, NO. 1
Lloyd Bonfield Reflects on a Journal’s Milestone
By Ruth Singleton
Continuity and Change: A journal of social structure, law and demography in past societies, co-founded by NYLS Professor Lloyd Bonfield, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. To commemorate this achievement, Professor Bonfield wrote an article for the anniversary issue of the journal, entitled “Reflections on thirty years of Continuity and Change.” New York Law School Magazine asked Professor Bonfield to answer a few questions about the journal’s 30-year history.
First, congratulations on this milestone. What was the impetus for starting up Continuity and Change?
The creation of academic journals seems
to be in my blood. The story of my involvement in Continuity and Change is both personal and professional. During the period of my fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, I became associated with
the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, through my academic mentor, Peter Laslett. After moving back to the United States to teach at Cornell Law School, I founded Law and History Review with a Cornell colleague, Russell Osgood. When I left Cornell, three years later, I decided that I wanted to continue my association with the “Group.”
Before then, the Group’s research was disseminated through collective volumes. My colleague and friend at the Group, Richard Wall, and I persuaded the Press that a journal, as the masthead relates, “whose agenda or methodology combines elements from traditional fields such
as history, sociology, law, demography, economics or anthropology or ranged freely between them” was a necessary component in their array of journals.
How did you decide on the title, and how do you think it has influenced the articles that have run in it over the years?
Little is in a name. What has really influenced the progress of the journal is
its mission, much debated at its inception, which appears on the masthead: “This new journal (now not so new) Continuity and Change aims to define an area.... Emphasis will be upon studies whose agenda
or methodology combines elements
from traditional fields such as history, sociology, law, demography, economics
or anthropology or ranges freely between them.” We were also fortunate in that a new generation of scholars in Europe and America flocked to the Cambridge Group and were committed to interdisciplinary history. The journal has helped forge connections between scholars by providing a forum.
I see that the journal is published in England by Cambridge