[4] According to Surrency, the journal was created to provide legal historians with a forum for their work and as a means of advancing the "law through a study of its history.

[8] The "American" part of the title denotes the journal's original location—in the United States—not the subject matter it publishes.

The journal, which was published from 1957 through 2015 by the Temple University Beasley School of Law, had four editors-in-chief during that time, all of whom were with Temple University's law school: Erwin Surrency (1957–1981), Diane C. Maleson (1982–2002), Lawrence J. Reilly (2008–2014), and Harwell Wells (2015).

[9] From 2016 to 2021 the editors were Stefan Vogenauer and Alfred Brophy, who relaunched the journal as an Oxford University Press imprint.

[11] In their seminal work on the evolution of the growth of American legal history as a field of study, William E. Nelson and John Phillip Reid noted that the journal is "a publication in which academic historians speak to each other .