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.

A provocative study of law and its social context, this work explores the contingent origins of the modern American economy. It shows how craftsmen - teamsters, barbers, musicians, and others - violently governed commerce in Chicago through pickets, assaults, and bombings. These tradesmen forcefully contested the power of national corporations in their city. Their resistance shaped American law, heavily influencing the New Deal and federal criminal statutes. This book thus shows that American industrial policy resulted not from a "search for order," but from a brutal struggle for control.

This collection of seventeen original essays reshapes the field of early American legal history not by focusing simply on law, or even on the relationship between law and society, but by using the concept of "legality" to explore the myriad ways in which the people of early America ordered their relationships with one another, whether as individuals, groups, classes, communities, or states.

Addressing issues of gender, ethnicity, family, patriarchy, culture, and dependence, contributors explore the transatlantic context of early American law, the negotiation between European and...

Volume I of the Cambridge History of Law in America begins the account of law in America with the very first moments of European colonization and settlement of the North American landmass. It follows those processes across two hundred years to the eventual creation and stabilization of the American republic. The book discusses the place of law in regard to colonization and empire, indigenous peoples, government and jurisdiction, population migrations, economic and commercial activity, religion, the creation of social institutions, and revolutionary politics. The Cambridge History of Law in...

Volume II of the Cambridge History of Law in America focuses on the long nineteenth century (1789-1920). It deals with the formation and development of the American state system, the establishment and growth of systematic legal education, the spread of the legal profession, the growing density of legal institutions and their interaction with political and social action, and the development of the modern criminal justice system. We also see how law intertwines with religion, how it becomes ingrained in popular culture, and how it intersects with the worlds of the American military and of...

Volume III of the Cambridge History of Law in America covers the period from 1920 to the present, the American Century . It charts a century of legal transformations - in the state, in legal thought and education, in professional organization and life, in American federalism and governance, in domestic affairs and international relations. It shows how, politically, socially and culturally, the twentieth century was when law became ubiquitous in American life. Among the themes discussed are innovation in the disciplinary and regulatory use of law, changes wrought by the intersection of law...