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 eagerly followed trial sparked a national debate over the legal rights and duties of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. The d'Hauteville case explains why popular trials become "precedents of legal experience"-- mediums for debates about highly contested social issues. It also demonstrates the ability of individual women and men to...

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 eagerly followed trial sparked a national debate over the legal rights and duties of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives. The d'Hauteville case explains why popular trials become "precedents of legal experience"-- mediums for debates about highly contested social issues. It also demonstrates the ability of individual women and men to...

Were slaves property or human beings under the law? Antebellum Southern judges designed efficient laws that protected property rights and helped slavery remain economically viable, laws that sheltered the persons embodied by that propertySH-the slaves themselves. Unintentionally, these judges generated rules applicable to ordinary Americans. Wahl provides a rigorous, compelling economic analysis of the common law of Southern slavery, inspecting thousands of legal disputes.

This book presents a fundamental reassessment of the nature 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 not employees at will but were often bound to their employment by enforceable labor agreements, which employers used whenever available to manage their labor costs and supply. Modern free wage labor only came into being late in the nineteenth century, as a result of reform legislation that restricted the contract remedies employers could legally use.

In the Age of Jackson, private enterprise set up shop in the American penal system. Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor...

In the Age of Jackson, private enterprise set up shop in the American penal system. Working hand in glove with state government, contractors in both the North and the South would go on to put more than half a million imprisoned men, women, and youth to hard, sweated toil for private gain by 1900. Held captive, stripped of their rights, and subject to lash and paddle, convict laborers churned out vast quantities of goods and revenue, in some years generating the equivalent of more than $30 billion worth of work. By the 1880s, however, a growing mass of Americans came to regard the prison labor...