AMERICAN LEGAL
HISTORY—THE LONG 19TH CENTURY
Created by Rachel N. Ponce, 2007
Description:
This syllabus identifies five stages in the development of law and
government in America from roughly 1776-1920. These roughly
chronological stages have been chosen in order to exemplify the
long-standing tension in American law between Republicanism (public
welfare and social control) and Liberalism (individual rights and
liberties). There is no teleology intended in framing the
stages as such, rather the structure is intended to suggest that each
ideology has had a place in American legal history—sometimes
as the predominant political force, sometimes as the voice of
opposition. Within the sections, I have tried to give
attention to both the larger structural forces at play and the way that
law affected individuals, as law impacts neither one nor the other
exclusively.
1. Federalism v. States Rights: Federalism with Limits
2. Regulating the Market: Property Rights and the Growth of Industry
3. People Without Rights: The Dark Side of Republicanism
4. Redefining the Individual: Liberalism Finds its Voice
5. The Health and Welfare of the Nation: Republicanism Strikes Back
A second purpose of this course is to familiarize graduate students
with a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches in
historical writing. The readings selected are not intended to
provided a monolithic picture of the themese outlined above, rather
they have been selected with an eye to highlighting historiographical
ruptures as well as continuities. There has been no shortage of
tensions and disagreements between scholars in American legal history
and this syllabus has been designed with the intention of
providing students enough information to weigh in on some of these
debates.
Federalism
v. States Rights: Federalism with Limits
Week 1: Building a
Nation: Creating a Federal Government
Amar, Akhil Reed, The
Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (1998). [Part
I]
Cornell, Saul, The
Other Founders:Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in
America, 1788-1828 (1999). [Part I]
Edling, Max, A
Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and
the Making of the American State (2003).
Rakove, Jack N. Original
Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
(1997).
Reid, John Phillip, Constitutional
History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Legislate
(1991).
Recommended
Appleby, Joyce, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican
Vision of the 1790’s (1984).
Beard, Charles A., An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of
the United States (1913).
Main, Jackson Turner, The Anti-Federalists: Critics of the
Constitution, 1781-1788 (1961).
Reid, John Phillip, Constitutional History of the American Revolution:
The Authority of Law (1993).
Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).
Week 2: The
Limits of Government Power: States versus the Federal Republic
Cornell, Saul, The
Other Founders:Anti-Federalism & the Dissenting Tradition in
America, 1788-1828 (1999). [Parts II & III]
Ericson, David F., The
Shaping of American Liberalism: The Debates Over Ratification,
Nullification, and Slavery (1993).
Freehling, William W., Prelude
to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836
(1965).
Koch, Adrienne and Harry Ammon, “The Virginia and Kentucky
Resolutions: An Episode in Jefferson's and Madison's Defense of Civil
Liberties” William
and Mary Quarterly 5 (1948).
McDonald, Forrest, States'
Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776-1876
(2000).
Recommended
Ellis, Richard E., The
Union at Risk: Jacksonian Democracy, States’ Right, and
Nullification Crisis (1989).
Smith, James Morton. Freedom's
Fetters: The Alien and Seduction Laws and American Civil Liberties
(1967).
Tachau, Mary K. Bonsteel, “The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky:
A Forgotten Episode of Civil Disobedience,” Journal of the Early Republic
2 (1982).
Regulating
the Market: Property Rights and the Growth of Industry
Week 3: Internal
Improvements: Paving the way for bridges, canals, and railroads
Dunlavy, Colleen A. Politics
and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia
(1994).
Fogel, Robert William, The
Union Pacific Railroad: A Case in Premature Enterprise
(1960).
Harley, C. Knick., “Oligopoly Agreement and the Timing of
American Railroad Construction,” Journal of Economic History
42 (1982).
Kutler, Stanley, Privilege
and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case
(1971).
Recommended
Farnham, Wallace D., “‘The Weakened Spring of
Government’: A Study in Nineteenth Century American
History,” American
Historical Review 68 (1963).
Koeppel, Gerard T., Water
for Gotham: A History (2001).
Larson, John Lauritz, Internal
Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular
Government in the Early United States (2001).
Sheriff, Carol, The
Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862
(1996).
Young, Jeremiah Simeon, A
Political and Constitutional Study of the Cumberland Road (1904).
Week 4: A growing market:
regulating an industrializing economy
Freidman, Lawrence, “Losing One’s Head: Judges and
the Law in Nineteenth Century American Legal History,” Law and Social Inquiry
24 (1999).
Freyer, Tony, “Reassessing the Impact of Eminent Domain in
Early American Economic Development,” Wisconsin Law Review
(1981).
Horwitz, Morton J., The
Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (1977).
Hurst, James Willard, Law
and the Conditions of Freedom in the United States (1956).
Karsten, Peter, Heart
Versus Head: Judge Made Law in Nineteenth-Century America
(1997).
Scheiber, “Property Law, Expropriation, and Resource
Allocation by Government: The United States, 1789-1910,”
Journal of Economic History 33 (1973).
--, "Regulation, Property Rights, and Definition of 'The Market': Law
and the American Economy" Journal
of Economic History 61 (1981).
Recommended
Handlin, Oscar, and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the
Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774-1861
(1947).
Karsten, Peter, “Explaining the Fight Over the Attractive
Nuisance Doctrine: A Kinder, Gentler Instrumentalism in the
‘Age of Formalism,’” Law and History Review
10 (1992).
McCraw, Thomas K. “Regulation in America: A Review
Article,” Business
History Review 49 (1975).
--, Prophets of
Regulation (1984).
Nedelsky, Jennifer, Private
Property and the Limits of American Constitutionalism: The Madisonian
Framework and Its Legacy (1990).
Scheiber, Harry N., “Government and the Economy: Studies of
the ‘Commonwealth’ Policy in Nineteenth-Century
America,” Journal
of Interdisciplinary History 3 (1972).
Week
5: Workers & Labor
Forbath, William E., Law
and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement (1991).
Morris, Richard B. Government
and Labor in Early American (1946).
Orren, Karen, Belated
Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States
(1991).
Steinfeld, Robert J., “The Philadelphia
Cordwainers’ Case of 1806: The Struggle Over Alternative
Legal Constructions of a Free Market in Labor,” in Labor Law in America: Historical
and Critical Essays, ed., Christopher L. Tomlins and
Andrew J. King (1992).
Witt, John Fabian, The
Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the
Remaking of American Law (2004).
Recommended
Stanley, Amy Dru, "Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will
and Commodity Relations," Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (2004).
Steinfeld, Robert J., The
Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and
American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (1992).
Tomlins, Christopher L. Law,
Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (1993).
Wilentz, Sean, Chants
Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class,
1788-1850 (1984).
Week
6: Institutionalizing slavery
Einhorn, Robin L. American
Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago 2006).
Fehrenbacher, Don E., The
Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States
Government’s Relations with Slavery (2001).
Morris, Thomas D., Southern
Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860 (1996).
Tushnet, Mark V., The
American Law of Slavery, 1810-1860 (1992).
Recommended
Cover, Robert M. Justice
Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (1975).
Fehrenbacher, Don E., The
Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (1978).
Nash, A. E. Keir, “Fairness and Formalism in the Trials of
Blacks in the State Supreme Courts of the Old South,” Virginia Law Review
(1970).
Nelson, William E., “The Impact of the Antislavery Movement
upon Styles of Judicial Reasoning in Nineteenth Century
America,”
Harvard Law Review 87 (1974).
Schiller, Reuel E., “Conflicting Obligations: Slave Law and
the Late Antebellum North Carolina Supreme Court,” Virginia Law Review
78 (1992).
People
Without Rights: The Dark Side of Republicanism
Week 7: Slaves’
experiences of the law
Fede, Andrew, People
Without Rights: An Interpretation of the Fundamentals of the Law of
Slavery in the U. S. South (1992).
Hindus, Michael, “Black Justice Under White Law: Criminal
Prosecutions of Black in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of American History
(1976).
Howington, Arthur F. What
Saveth the Law: The Treatment of Slaves and Free Blacks in the State
and Local Courts of Tennessee (1986).
McLaurin, Melton A., Celia:
A Slave (1991).
Schwartz, Phillip J., “Forging the Shackles: The Development
of Virginia’s Criminal Code for Slaves,” in Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal
History of the South, eds. David J. Bodenhamer and James
W. Ely, Jr. (1984).
Recommended
Hindus, Michael, Prison
and Plantation: Crime, Justice, and Authority in Massachusetts and
South, 1767-1878 (1974).
Bodenhamer, David J. and James W. Ely, Jr., eds., Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal
History of the South (1984).
Week 8: Criminal Justice
Ayers, Edward L. Vengeance
and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth Century American
South (1984).
Goebel, Julius, Felony
and Misdemeanor: A Study in the History of Criminal Law (1937).
Monkkonen, Eric H., Murder
in New York City (2000).
Nelson, William E., “Emerging Notions of Modern Criminal Law
in the Revolutionary Era: An Historical Perspective,” New York University Law Review
42 (1967).
Sheldon, Randall G., Controlling
the Dangerous Classes: A Critical Introduction to the History of
Criminal Justice (2001).
Curtis, George B. “The Checkered Career of Parens
Patriae: The State As Parent or Tyrant?” DePaul Law Review
25 (1976).
Recommended
Friedman, Lawrence, Crime and Punishment in American History (1993).
Hartog, Hendrik, “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and
‘The Unwritten Law,’ in Nineteenth-Century
America,” Journal of American History (1997).
Steinberg, Allen, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia,
1800-1880 (1989).
Week 9: The Penitentiary System and the Death Penalty
Kann, Mark E., Punishment, Prisons, and Patriarchy: Liberty and Power
in the Early American Republic (2005).
Masur, Lewis, Rites of Execution: Capital Punishment and the
Transformation of American Culture (1989).
Pisciotta, Alexander W., Benevolent Repression: Social Control and the
American Reformatory-Prison Movement (1994).
Rothman, David J., The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and
Disorder in the New Republic (1971).
Recommended
Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1975).
Hirsch, Adam Jay, The Rise of Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in
Early America (1992).
Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the
Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1978).
Johnston, Norman, Kenneth Finkle, and Jeffery A. Cohen, Eastern State
Penitentiary: A Crucible of Good Intentions (1994).
Steelwater, Eliza, The Hangman’s Knot: Lynching, Legal
Execution, and America’s Struggle with the Death Penalty
(2003).
Week 10: Medical Jurisprudence and Insanity
Grob, Gerald, The State and the Mentally Ill (1965).
Mohr, James C. Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth
Century America (1993).
Rosenberg, Charles E., Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and
the Law in the Gilded Age (1968).
Tighe, Janet, “Francis Wharton and the Nineteenth-Century
Insanity Defense: The Origins of a Reform Tradition,” (1983).
Recommended
Hughes, John, In the Law’s Darkness: Isaac Ray and the
Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity in Nineteenth Century America (1986).
Moran, Richard, Knowing Right From Wrong: The Insanity Defense of
Daniel McNaughtan. (1981).
-----, “The Modern Foundation for the Insanity Defense: The
Cases of James Hadfield (1800) and Daniel McNaughtan (1843),”
The Annals 477 (1985).
Redefining the Individual: Liberalism Finds its Voice
Week 11: Reconstruction
Amar, Akhil Reed, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction
(1998). [Part II]
Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,
1863-1877 (1988).
Pincus, Samuel N., The Virginia Supreme Court, Blacks and the Laws,
1870-1902 (1990).
Recommended
Howard, Victor B., “The Black Testimony Controversy in
Kentucky, 1866-1872,” Journal of Negro History 58 (1973).
Hyman, Harold M. A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and
Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973).
Kaczorowski, Robert J., “To Begin the Nation Anew: Congress,
Citizenship, and Civil Rights after the Civil War,” American
Historical Review 92 (1987).
Nelson, William E., The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle
to Judicial Doctrine (1988).
Week 12: The Corporation
Dodd, E. Merrick, Jr., American Business Corporations until 1860 (1954).
Handlin, Oscar, and Mary Flug Handlin, “Origins of the
American Business Corporation,” in Enterprise and Secular
Change, eds. Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma (1953).
Hovenkamp, Herbert, Enterprise and American Law, 1863-1960 (1991).
Keller, Morton, “The Pluralist State: American Economic
Regulation in Comparative Perspective, 1900-1930,” in
Regulation and Perspective, ed. Thomas K. McCraw (1981).
Lerner, Max, “The Supreme Court and American
Capitalism,” Yale Law Journal 42 (1933).
Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism,
1890-1916 (1988).
Recommended
Berle, Adolph A. and Gardiner C. Means, The Modern Corporation and
Private Property (1968).
Evans, George Heberton, Jr., Business Incorporations in the United
States, 1800-1943 (1948).
Hartog, Hendrik, Public Property and Private Power: The Corporation of
the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1973).
Hurst, James Willard, The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the
Law of the United States, 1780-1970 (1970).
Nelson, William E., The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830-1900 (1982).
The Health and Welfare of the Nation: Republicanism Strikes Back
Week 13: Health & The People’s Welfare
Duffy, John, The Sanitarians: A History of American Public Health
(1990).
Hammonds, Evelynn Maxine, Childhood’s Deadly Scourge: The
Campaign to Control Diptheria in New York City, 1880-1930 (1999).
Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in
Nineteenth-Century America (1996).
Rosenberg, Charles E. The Cholera Years: The United States in
1832, 1849, and 1866 (1962).
Recommended
Rosen, George, “Cameralism and the Concept of Medical
Police,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 27 (1953).
Rosenkrantz, Barbara Gutmann, Public Health and the State: Changing
Views in Massachusetts, 1842-1936 (1972).
Willrich, Michael, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive
Era Chicago (2003).
Week 14: Toward the New Deal: Progressivism and the State
Fine, Sidney, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of
Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (1956).
Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and
Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986).
Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of
National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (1982).
Willrich, Michael, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive
Era Chicago (2003).
Recommended
Novak, Willam J., "The Legal Origins of the Modern American State," in
Bryant Garth, Robert Kagan, and Austin Sarat, eds., Looking Back at
Law's Century (2001).
Woodard, Calvin, “Reality and Social Reform: The Transition
from Laissez-Faire to the Welfare State,” Yale Law Journal 72
(1962).
Soifer, Aviam, “The Paradox of Paternalism and Laissez-Faire
Constitutionalism: United States Supreme Court, 1888-1921,”
Law and History Review 5 (1987).
Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and
Practice of “Progressive” Juvenile Justice,
1825-1920 (1977).
GENERAL REFERENCES:
Bright, Charles C. “The State in the United States During the
Nineteenth Century,” in Statemaking and Social Movements, ed.
Charles C. Bright and Susan Harding (1984).
Hall, Kermit, The Magic Mirror: Law in American History (1989).
Kelly, Alfred H., Winfred A Harbison, and Herman Belz, The American
Constitution: It’s Origins and Development, 5th ed. (1976).
McCloskey, Richard G. The American Supreme Court (1960).
Skocpol, Theda, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of
Analysis in Current Research,” in Bringing the State Back In,
ed. Peter R. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (1985).