To travel from premodernism through modernism and into post-modernism might take several centuries and even millennia. American legal thought, remarkably so, has made the voyage in just over two hundred years. My purpose is to tell the story of this mercurial journey. To narrate this story successfully, I divide the book into two parts. The first and briefer part (chapter 2 only) explores the general concepts of premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism.