Product Description

In a remarkable book based on prodigious research, Morton J. Horwitz offers a sweeping overview of the emergence of a national (and modern) legal system from English and colonial antecedents. He treats the evolution of the common law as intellectual history and also demonstrates how the shifting views of private law became a dynamic element in the economic growth of the United States.

Horwitz's subtle and sophisticated explanation of societal change begins with the common law, which was intended to provide justice for all. The great breakpoint came after 1790 when the law was slowly transformed to favor economic growth and development. The courts spurred economic competition instead of circumscribing it. This new instrumental law flourished as the legal profession and the mercantile elite forged a mutually beneficial alliance to gain wealth and power.

The evolving law of the early republic interacted with political philosophy, Horwitz shows. The doctrine of laissez-faire, long considered the cloak for competition, is here seen as a shield for the newly rich. By the 1840s the overarching reach of the doctrine prevented further distribution of wealth and protected entrenched classes by disallowing the courts very much power to intervene in economic life.

This searching interpretation, which connects law and the courts to the real world, will engage historians in a new debate. For to view the law as an engine of vast economic transformation is to challenge in a stunning way previous interpretations of the eras of revolution and reform.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83205 in Books
• Published on: 1979-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
He has read widely in many fields...[and] has gathered a rich harvest for any reader...a remarkable achievement. (Yale Law Journal )

It is to be hoped that a wide audience will read it since the issues it raises are indispensable...Horwitz's book is written with a passion. (New York Review of Books )

A thoughtful contribution to the continuing issue of whether and how much we are governed by our judges. (Library Journal )

One of the five most significant books ever published in the field of American legal history.
--William E. Nelson, Yale University

Review
One of the five most significant books ever published in the field of American legal history.
--William E. Nelson, Yale University

About the Author
Morton J. Horwitz is a graduate of City College of New York and received a doctorate in Government and a law degree from Harvard University. Author of numerous articles in law and history, Mr. Horwitz is Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, where he teaches legal history.

Customer Reviews

Tough nut to crack, yes. But a brilliant work no less.
As one reviewer and the publisher had pointed out, the basic premise of the book is how the common law sought to accommodate the economic changes (and actually sought to allocate wealth) during the formative years of this republic. Some commentators have criticized this book as a Marxian dialectic attack of the American law--in particular from the Chicago School quarters. (Chicago Law Review published a very scathing review in the 70s with the aim, I suspect, to discredit Horwitz's argument) But I thought Professor Horwitz did a wonderful job in supporting his argument with citation and documentation. Is he a revisionst? Maybe. But he's more of an E.P. Thompson than a Howard Zinn. In any event, this book presents a very convincing argument despite its tendentiousness.
P.s. For those of you who want to avoid "legal arcana" or those who want a more eclectic treatment of the development of the American law, I would recommend Lawrence Friedman's History of the American Law.

What Laissez-Faire?
Laissez-Faire means live and let live. In this history by Morton Horwitz, we see that along with the rise of corporatism in America was the demise of laissez-faire through the interventionist hand of the state's judicial system:

Mill owners were allowed by government to destroy other people's property by flood;

Canals and railroads were built by seizing land through "eminent domain";

The right of juries to decide judgements for damages in tort cases was taken from them and given to judges;

Contract labor laws - "if a worker signed a contract to work for a year, and left before the year was up, he was not entitled to any wages, even for the time he had worked. But the courts at the same time said that if a building business broke a contract, it was entitled to be paid for whatever had been done up to that point".

Horwitz shows us that laissez-faire was replaced by corporatism, but he doesn't tell us that because the corporatists label their actions behind a false label, Horwitz rails against their false label rather than the actual label of corporatism that accurately describes their actions: "By the middle of the nineteenth century the legal system had been reshaped to the advantage of men of commerce and industry at the expense of farmers, workers, consumers, and other less powerful groups". Included in these other less powerful groups was the laissez-faire entrepeneur, the sole-proprietor and/or partner(s) in business who were responsible for their actions as businessmen unlike the owners of corporations who hid behind hired managers and the law that held the owners exempt. The worst fraud committed on the American people was the deeming of the corporation as an artificial person with constitutional rights.

Tough but interesting.
I have both a J.D. and a Ph.D. in American history, and this book is tough sledding for me. In short, the subject matter -- the way judges adapted American law to accommodate economic change in the first half of the nineteenth century -- is interesting, but the reader is dragged through lots of legal arcana _en route_. I don't recommend this title for the faint of heart.