Research Catalog

Title

The creation of American common law, 1850-1880 : technology, politics, and the construction of citizenship / Howard Schweber.

Author

Schweber, Howard H.

Publication

Cambridge, U.K. ; New York, N.Y. : Cambridge University Press, c2004.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

viii, 296 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

"This book is a comparative study of 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 that 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."--BOOK JACKET.

Subject

• Geschichte 1850-1880
• 1800-1899
• Common law > United States > History > 19th century

Genre/Form

History

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-292) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Introduction -- North and South -- Illinois: "We were determined to have a rail-road" -- "The memory of man runneth not to the contrary": cases involving damage to property -- "Intelligent beings": cases involving injuries to persons -- The North: Ohio, Vermont, and New York -- Virginia in the 1850s: the last days of planter rule -- The common law of antebellum Virginia: the preservation of status -- Virginia's version of American common law: old wine in new bottles -- The South: Georgia, North Carolina, and Kentucky -- Legal change and social order.

ISBN

0521824621 (hardback)

LCCN

^^2003048467

OCLC

• 51942547
• SCSB-10277362

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library