Wow! eBook
The Creation of American Common Law, 1850–1880:Technology, Politics, and the Construction of Citizenship
by: Howard Schweber (Author)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (12 Jan. 2004)
Language: English
Print length: 306 pages
ISBN-10: 0521824621
ISBN-13: 9780521824620
Book Description
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 northe and southe 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 mode 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.
