Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic is a fundamental reinterpretation of law and politics in America between 1790 and 1850, the crucial period of the Republic's early growth and its movement toward industrialism. The book is the most detailed study yet available of the intellectual and institutional processes that created the foundation categories framing all the basic legal relationships involving working people at work. But it also brings out the political and social significance of those categories, and of law's role in their creation. Tomlins argues that it is...

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.

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.

Through courtroom dramas from 1865 to 1920, Recasting American Liberty offers a dramatic reconsideration of the critical role railroads, and their urban counterpart, streetcars, played in transforming the conditions of individual liberty at the dawn of the 20th century. The three-part narrative, focusing on the law of accidental injury, nervous shock, and racial segregation in public transit, captures Americans' journey from a cultural and legal ethos celebrating manly independence and autonomy to one that recognized and sought to protect the individual against the corporate power, modern...

Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. Michael Vorenberg tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation happened after, not before the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by previous historians, and that the abolition of slavery...

Freedom of speech is a central tenet of the American way of life that is tested and fought over seemingly every day. Curiously, people who follow and study free speech issues assume that controversies and litigation about free speech began abruptly during World War I. The surprising research in this original book reveals that this conventional view is incorrect, and that the previously unknown history of free speech between the Civil War and World War I is rich and varied. For instance, the author shows that important free speech controversies, often involving the activities of sex reformers...

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.

What could be more "liberal" than believing in society's responsibility for crime--that crime is less the product of free will than of poverty and other social forces beyond the individual's control? And what could be more "progressive" than the belief that the law should aim for social, not merely individual, justice? This work of social, cultural, and legal history uncovers the contested origins and paradoxical consequences of the two protean concepts in the cosmopolitan cities of industrial America at the turn of the twentieth century.