"The essays in “History, Memory, and the Law” deploy a wide range of theories in diverse contexts to show law’s role in commemoration and the ways it constructs its own history. Yet each illuminates the limits of law as a site of memory and as a reader and interpreter of history. Each also highlights it flexibility, responsiveness, and adaptability. No memory, no matter how important or powerful it would seem to be, reliably can be preserved in and through legal decisions and institutions. No memory, no matter how powerful or important it would seem to be, reliably can make its presence felt to open up, to correct, or to control law. And similarly, the history that law constructs, as well as the techniques used to construct, cannot ensure a certain outcome. Law’s history and its hermeneutics are neither linear nor immune to improvisations, inventions, and ingeniously artful readings. To study history and memory in law, then, is to be reminded of law’s almost inexhaustible capacity to be, and do, many complex and contradictory things, all the while denying the contradictions and plausibly proclaiming its “formal existence.”"