Bøger i Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society serien

In the decades before the Civil War, Americans appealed to the nation's sacred religious and legal texts - the Bible and the Constitution - to address the slavery crisis. The ensuing political debates over slavery deepened interpreters' emphasis on historical readings of the sacred texts, and in turn, these readings began to highlight the unbridgeable historical distances that separated nineteenth-century Americans from biblical and founding pasts. While many Americans continued to adhere to a belief in the Bible's timeless teachings and the Constitution's enduring principles, some antislavery readers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln, used historical distance to reinterpret and use the sacred texts as antislavery documents. By using the debate over American slavery as a case study, Jordan T. Watkins traces the development of American historical consciousness in antebellum America, showing how a growing emphasis on historical readings of the Bible and the Constitution gave rise to a sense of historical distance.

Combining archival research, critical theory, and gender- and disability-analysis, Nate Holdren argues that Progressive Era reform to employee injury law created new employment discrimination against disabled people and a new injury culture that treated employees and their injuries instrumentally.

Reassessing one of the most influential figures in American law, Wells examines all aspects of Holmes's life to provide a new understanding of his multifaceted personality. This analysis of the Supreme Court Justice will appeal to legal scholars, historians, philosophers, and general readers interested in biography and American history.

In an incisive analysis of over two dozen clauses as well as several 'unwritten' rules and practices, The Constitutional Origins of the American Civil War shows how the conflicting constitutional interpretations of ordinary and elite Americans aggravated the sectional conflict over slavery to the point of civil war.

Offers new understandings of the famous foxhunting case, Pierson v. Post, and its role in legal education and legal professionalization. This book is meant for legal historians, lawyers, and law professors and students.

Examines the experiences of couples in controversial unions and the legal and cultural backlash against contested marital arrangements in twentieth-century America. Will appeal to readers studying marriage law, gender, sexuality, class, and race in the US, and those seeking historical insight into the recent debates over the definition of marriage.

Justin Desautels-Stein focuses on the development of pragmatic liberalism, between 1870 and the present. Using property law, constitutional law, and antitrust law as case studies, he places the intellectual history of liberalism into a contemporary legal context.

Zietlow uses the life of James Mitchell Ashley as a unique lens through which to explore the ideological origins of Reconstruction, the political antislavery movement, and the constitutional changes wrought in this era. For scholars of nineteenth-century history, as well as the history of American slavery, abolition, and emancipation.

Focusing on a conflict in Alabama during the 1980s, Robert Daniel Rubin considers how conservative evangelicals forged a political identity. To protect Christianity's role in public education, they both resisted and solicited the federal courts. This book will be of interest to historians, political scientists, and constitutional lawyers.

Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection offers an original account of the legal and political thought of Thomas Jefferson and the reception of narratives of empire and constitutional transformation during the era of the American Revolution. This book uniquely places Jefferson's own attention to history in conversation with modern thought.

Appealing to legal historians and scholars, this antebellum history uses original legal suits to analyse the understanding, use, and adaptation of formal law by slave holders and slaves within the American Confluence, an area of liminal boundaries where the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri Rivers converge.

Gender Remade explores the passage from territory to state in the Pacific Northwest, especially in Washington, showing that jury duty was as important as the right to vote in late nineteenth-century campaigns for constitutional equality and offers ways to remedy the neglect of state and territorial studies among constitutional historians.

Owning Ideas explores the history of the emergence of intellectual property in the United States during the nineteenth century, examining the fields of both patent and copyright. It will appeal to readers interested in the concept of ideas as private property, and how it holds a dominant position in modern economic and cultural life.

The Law of the Whale Hunt provides an innovative examination of how property law was created in the absence of formal legal institutions regulating American whaling. Robert Deal tells an exciting story of how American whalers resolved complex disputes over whales instead of resorting to the courts.

The first book to develop an in-depth analysis of how legal and political ideas concerning the criminalization of racial violence have evolved from slavery to the present, and to offer new historical and theoretical perspective for analyzing limits of current attempts to use criminal legislation as a weapon against racism.

Forging Rivals tells the story of the rise and fall of postwar liberalism, vividly recounting the attempts of working people, labor lawyers, and civil rights litigators to create a legal system that promoted both economic opportunity and racial egalitarianism.

This is a study of the central role of history in late nineteenth-century American legal thought.

Making the Modern American Fiscal State chronicles the rise of the US system of direct and progressive taxation, providing historical perspective on the intellectual, legal and administrative foundations of the current US tax regime. Ajay K. Mehrotra explores what tax reformers at the turn of the twentieth century accomplished and how their limited achievements were contested at nearly every turn.

This book examines a pattern of conservative resurgence following several eras of reform in American history by pointing to the phenomenon of 'recalibration'. By highlighting recalibration as a regular companion to reform, the book ultimately sheds light on the barriers to, and possibilities for, sweeping change in American politics.

Law's Imagined Republic shows how the American Revolution was marked by the rapid proliferation of law talk across the colonies. Drawing on a wealth of material from criminal cases, Steven Wilf reconstructs the intertextual ways Americans from the 1760s through the 1790s read law.

This book challenges existing understandings of child labor by tracing how law altered the meanings of work for young people in the United States between the Revolution and the Great Depression, finding the origins of the shifts in litigations that occurred in the wake of industrial accidents incurred by young workers.

This book describes how the international spread of antitrust suggested the historical process shaping global capitalism.

In this 2003 book, Willrich uncovers the contested origins and paradoxical consequences of two protean concepts in the cosmopolitan cities of industrial America at the turn of the twentieth century: the modern ideas of social responsibility for crime and the belief that the law should aim for social, not merely individual, justice.

A Judgment for Solomon tells the story of the d'Hauteville case, a controversial child custody battle fought in 1840. It uses the story of one couple's bitter fight over their son to explore some timebound and timeless features of American legal culture.

This history of efforts to desegregate northern schools during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century explores two dominant themes. This book examines why so many northern communities did engage in school segregation (in violation of state laws) and how northern blacks challenged this illegal activity.

This book explains how the new business rhetoric of the 1920s, especially the term 'racketeering', prompted Americans to conflate organised crime and organised labour. The struggle between craftsmen, corporations and reformers shaped American law, as tradesmen helped create new anti-racketeering laws and New Deal industrial policies during the 1930s.

This book presents a fundamental reassessment of wage labor in the nineteenth century, focusing on the use of sanctions to enforce wage labor agreements. Professor Steinfeld argues that wage workers were often bound to their employment by enforceable labor agreements, which employers used to manage labor costs and supply.

Through courtroom dramas from 1865 to 1920, Barbara Welke offers a dramatic reconsideration of the critical role railroads, and streetcars, played in transforming the conditions of individual liberty at the dawn of the twentieth century, focusing on the law of accidental injury, nervous shock, and racial segregation in public transit.