The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy
- ISBN-10
- 0190282428
- ISBN-13
- 9780190282424
- Category
- Law
- Pages
- 384
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1994-12-15
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Author
- Morton J. Horwitz
Description
When the first volume of Morton Horwitz's monumental history of American law appeared in 1977, it was universally acclaimed as one of the most significant works ever published in American legal history. The New Republic called it an "extremely valuable book." Library Journal praised it as "brilliant" and "convincing." And Eric Foner, in The New York Review of Books, wrote that "the issues it raises are indispensable for understanding nineteenth-century America." It won the coveted Bancroft Prize in American History and has since become the standard source on American law for the period between 1780 and 1860. Now, Horwitz presents The Transformation of American Law, 1870 to 1960, the long-awaited sequel that brings his sweeping history to completion. In his pathbreaking first volume, Horwitz showed how economic conflicts helped transform law in antebellum America. Here, Horwitz picks up where he left off, tracing the struggle in American law between the entrenched legal orthodoxy and the Progressive movement, which arose in response to ever-increasing social and economic inequality. Horwitz introduces us to the people and events that fueled this contest between the Old Order and the New. We sit in on Lochner v. New York in 1905--where the new thinkers sought to undermine orthodox claims for the autonomy of law--and watch as Progressive thought first crystallized. We meet Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and recognize the influence of his incisive ideas on the transformation of law in America. We witness the culmination of the Progressive challenge to orthodoxy with the emergence of Legal Realism in the 1920s and '30s, a movement closely allied with other intellectual trends of the day. And as postwar events unfold--the rise of totalitarianism abroad, the McCarthyism rampant in our own country, the astonishingly hostile academic reaction to Brown v. Board of Education--we come to understand that, rather than self-destructing as some historians have asserted, the Progressive movement was alive and well and forming the roots of the legal debates that still confront us today. The Progressive legacy that this volume brings to life is an enduring one, one which continues to speak to us eloquently across nearly a century of American life. In telling its story, Horwitz strikes a balance between a traditional interpretation of history on the one hand, and an approach informed by the latest historical theory on the other. Indeed, Horwitz's rich view of American history--as seen from a variety of perspectives--is undertaken in the same spirit as the Progressive attacks on an orthodoxy that believed law an objective, neutral entity. The Transformation of American Law is a book certain to revise past thinking on the origins and evolution of law in our country. For anyone hoping to understand the structure of American law--or of America itself--this volume is indispensable.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 1992-07-16
- 384 pages
- Ebook
- Oxford University Press
Similar books
-
The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
By Morton J. Horwitz, Morton J HorwitzBeginning with the first English treatise on contract, Powell's Essay Upon the Law of Contracts and Agreements (1790), a major feature of contract writing has been its denunciation of equitable conceptions of substantive justice as ...
-
The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
By Morton J. HorwitzThe Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
-
The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860
By Morton J. HorwitzIn this monumental book, Morton J. Horwitz offers a sweeping overview of the emergence of our national (and modern) legal system from English and colonial antecedents.
-
City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago
By Michael WillrichWilliam R. Brock , Welfare , Democracy , and the New Deal ( Cambridge , 1988 ) ; Michael B. Katz , In the Shadow of the Poorhouse : A Social History of Welfare in America ( New York , 1986 ) , 206-47 . The great public controversies ...
-
Law, Society, and History: Themes in the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence M. Friedman
By Robert W. Gordon, Morton J. HorwitzCAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN LAW AND SOCIETY Cambridge Studies in Law and Society aims to publish the best scholarly work on legal discourse and practice in its social and institutional contexts, combining theoretical insights and empirical ...
-
Honor, Status, and Law in Modern Latin America
By Lara Putnam, Sarah C. Chambers, Sueann CaulfieldThis collection brings together recent scholarship that examines how understandings of honor changed in Latin America between political independence in the early nineteenth century and the rise of nationalist challenges to liberalism in the ...
-
Liberalism and Social Action
By John DeweyIn this, one of Dewey's most accessible works, he surveys the history of liberal thought from John Locke to John Stuart Mill, in his search to find the core of...
-
The Great Tradition: Constitutional History and National Identity in Britain and the United States, 1870-1960
By Richard A. Cosgrove, Anthony Brundage... state and nation have claimed increasing importance in the identity issue.?l Control of the past implied command of ... By the time Stubbs published the Select Charters in 1870 , earlier historians such as Henry Hallam ( 1777–1859 ) ...
-
Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality
By Sundhya PahujaSee also, Muriel E. Chamberlain, The Longman Companion to European Decolonisation in the Twentieth Century (London, New York: Longman, 1998), 21. 2 Atlantic Charter, signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, ...
-
The Legal Nature of Corporations
By Ernst FreundThis work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations.