This book is a comparative study of the American legal development in the mid-nineteenth century. Focusing on Illinois and Virginia, supported by observations from six additional states, the book traces the crucial formative moment in the development of an American system of common law in northern and southern courts. The process of legal development, and the form the basic analytical categories of American law came to have, are explained as the products of different responses to the challenge of new industrial technologies, particularly railroads. The nature of those responses was dictated by the ideologies that accompanied the social, political, and economic orders of the two regions. American common law, ultimately, is found to express an emerging model of citizenship, appropriate to modern conditions. As a result, the process of legal development provides an illuminating perspective on the character of American political thought in a formative period of the nation.

"Common law" is the name for legal principals developed by judges. America developed its own system of the common law in the mid-nineteenth century, abandoning the system inherited from England. This book is a comparative study of the development of American law that contrasts the experiences of North and South by a study of Illinois and Virginia, supported by observations from six states. The book has a new comparative focus highlighting the connections between legal development, American political thought, and American political and economic development.

The Common Law changed America forever. The lectures - which were given at the Lowell Institute in Boston and subsequently published in 1880 - created a buzz of excitement that enveloped the New England intellectual community. Over a century later, we can look back at The Common Law and still feel the same sense of excitement that our predecessors did, virtually undiminished by the tumultuous decades of American jurisprudence that have followed.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

"This book is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., a foundation established to encourage study of the ideal of a free and responsible individuals."

This book argues for a change in our understanding of the relationships among law, politics and history. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, a certain anti-foundational conception of history has served to undermine law's foundations, such that we tend to think of law as nothing other than a species of politics. Thus viewed, the activity of unelected, common law judges appears to be an encroachment on the space of democracy. However, Kunal M. Parker shows that the world of the nineteenth century looked rather different. Democracy was itself constrained by a sense that history possessed a logic, meaning and direction that democracy could not contravene. In such a world, far from law being seen in opposition to democracy, it was possible to argue that law - specifically, the common law - did a better job than democracy of guiding America along history's path.

Publisher Description

This Companion provides a broad, historically informed introduction to the study of the US constitutional system. In place of the usual laundry lists of cases, doctrines, and theories, it presents a picture of the constitutional system in action, with separate sections devoted to constitutional principles, organizational structures, and the various legal and extra-legal 'actions' through which litigators and average citizens have attempted to bring about constitutional change. Finally, the volume covers a number of subjects that are rarely discussed in works aimed at a general audience, but which are critical to ensuring that constitutional rights are honored in the day-to-day lives of citizens. These include standing and causes of action, suits against officeholders, and the inner workings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). This Companion places present-day constitutional controversies in historical context, and offers insights from a range of disciplines, including history, political science, and law.

Explains why lawyers seeking gender progress from primary legal materials should start with the common law.

This wide-ranging comparative account of the legal regimes for controlling administrative power in England, the USA and Australia argues that differences and similarities between control regimes may be partly explained by the constitutional structures of the systems of government in which they are embedded. It applies social-scientific and historical methods to the comparative study of law and legal systems in a novel and innovative way, and combines accounts of long-term and large-scale patterns of power distribution with detailed analysis of features of administrative law and the administrative justice systems of three jurisdictions. It also proposes a new method of analysing systems of government based on two different models of the distribution of public power (diffusion and concentration), a model which proves more illuminating than traditional separation-of-powers analysis.