THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF LAW IN AMERICA VOL II: THE LONG NINETEENTH CENTURY (1789-1920). Ed by Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (www.cambridge.org), 2008. xviii + 869 pp. ISBN 9780521803069. £75.
| Date | 01 January 2010 |
| Published date | 01 January 2010 |
| Pages | 182-184 |
| DOI | 10.3366/E1364980909001243 |
This volume not only provides an excellent showcase of some of the best current writing on American legal history, but also gives a good view of the dominant approach to the subject on the other side of the Atlantic. It is composed of nineteen substantial chapters, fewer than half of which are written by scholars teaching in law schools. The book is “topped and tailed” by chapters providing fine overviews of the changing role of the state in the period. The first, “Law and the American State, from the Revolution to the Civil War” by Mark R Wilson, questions the received view that the state was exceptionally weak in the antebellum era. His subtle discussion shows that the national state played a significant role in matters such as population, the economy and territory. By contrast, the last chapter, by William E Forbath on “Politics, State-Building, and the Courts, 1870-1920”, argues that the state, which had grown during and after the Civil War, was under attack by the 1870s, as Liberals sought to limit state interference with private property and resisted Progressive demands for a larger administrative state. In this context, the size and power of the regulatory state was often determined by the judiciary, frequently to the benefit of businessmen and at the expense of workmen. The institutions of law are also explored in three early chapters on the legal profession and the courts. Hugh C MacGill and R Kent Newmyer provide an overview of legal education and legal thought over the whole period, while Alfred S Konefsky supplements this with a discussion of the legal profession in the antebellum era. Kermit L Hall then looks at the system of courts and judges during the long nineteenth century. The volume also contains two chapters on the much-neglected subject of military law (by Jonathan Lurie, whose treatment takes the subject to the end of the twentieth century) and on the US and international affairs (by Eileen P Scully).
The core of the book is more concerned with the social history of American law, with twelve chapters devoted to particular topics on this theme. In her chapter on criminal justice, Elizabeth Dale reconsiders the received view that, although the US developed no national criminal justice system in the nineteenth century, it experienced localised versions of the same thing. She questions this, by looking outside the courtroom, and showing that the state was never able to obtain a monopoly on violence. Substantive law was often ignored...
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