The intellectual development of American legal thought has progressed remarkably quickly form the nation's founding through today. Stephen Feldman traces this development through the lens of broader intellectual movements and in this work applies the concepts of premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism to legal thought, using examples or significant cases from Supreme Court history. Comprehensive and accessible, this single volume provides an overview of the evolution of American legal thought up to the present.

In The American Indian in Western Legal Thought Robert Williams, a legal scholar and Native American of the Lumbee tribe, traces the evolution of contemporary legal thought on the rights and status of American Indians and other indiginous tribal peoples. Beginning with an analysis of the medieval Christian crusading era and its substantive contributions to the West's legal discourse of h̀eathens' and ìnfidels', this study explores the development of the ideas that justified the New World conquests of Spain, England and the United States. Williams shows that long-held notions of the legality of European subjugation and colonization of s̀avage' and b̀arbarian' societies supported the conquests in America. Today, he demonstrates, echoes of racist and Eurocentric prejudices still reverberate in the doctrines and principles of legal discourse regarding native peoples' rights in the United States and in other nations as well.--

Two Victorian Era intellectual movements changed the course of American legal thought: Darwinian natural selection and marginalist economics. The two movements rested on fundamentally inconsistent premises. Darwinism emphasized instinct, random selection, and determinism; marginalism emphasized rational choice. American legal theory managed to accommodate both, although to different degrees in different disciplines. The two movements also developed mutually exclusive scientific methodologies. Darwinism emphasizing external indicators of welfare such as productivity, education or health, while marginalists emphasized market choice. Historians have generally exaggerated the role of Darwinism in American legal thought, while understating the role of marginalist economics. This book explores these issues in several legal disciplines and time periods, including Progressive Era redistributive policies, American common law, public law, and laws regarding corporations and competition. One is Progressive Era movements for redistributive policies about taxation and public goods. Darwinian science also dominated the law of race relations, while criminal law reflected an inconsistent mixture of Darwinian and marginalist incentive-based theories. The common law, including family law, contract, property, and tort, moved from emphasis on correction of past harms to management of ongoing risk and relationship. A chapter on Legal Realism emphasizes the Realists' indebtedness to institutional economics, a movement that powerfully influenced American legal theory long after it fell out of favor with economists. Five chapters on the corporation, innovation and competition policy show how marginalist economics transformed business policy. The ironic exception was patent law, which developed in relative insulation from economic concerns about innovation policy. The book concludes with three chapters on public law, emphasizing the role of institutionalist economics in policy making during and after the New Deal. A lengthy epilogue then explores the variety of postwar attempts to reconstruct a defensible and more market-oriented rule of law after the decline of Legal Realism and the New Deal.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Renowned legal historian Lawrence Friedman presents an accessible and authoritative history of American law from the colonial era to the present day. This fully revised fourth edition incorporates the latest research to bring this classic work into the twenty-first century. In addition to looking closely at timely issues like race relations, the book covers the changing configurations of commercial law, criminal law, family law, and the law of property. Friedman furthermore interrogates the vicissitudes of the legal profession and legal education. The underlying theory of this eminently readable book is that the law is the product of society. In this way, we can view the history of the legal system through a sociological prism as it has evolved over the years.

American Law in a Global Context is an elegant and erudite introduction to the American legal system from a global perspective. It covers the law and lawyering tools taught in the first year of law school, explaining the underlying concepts and techniques of the common law used in U.S. legal practice. The ideas central to the development and practice of American law, as well as constitutional law, contracts, property, criminal law, and courtroom procedure, are all presented in their historical and intellectual contexts, accessible to the novice but with insight that will inform the expert. Actual cases illuminate each major subject, engaging readers in the legal process and the arguments between real people that make American law an ever-evolving system.

A critical history of the Americanization of legal education in fourteen countries The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the export of American power—both hard and soft—throughout the world. What role did US cultural and economic imperialism play in legal education? American Legal Education Abroad offers an unprecedented and surprising picture of the history of legal education in fourteen countries beyond the United States. Each study in this book represents a critical history of the Americanization of legal education, reexamining prevailing narratives of exportation, transplantation, and imperialism. Collectively, these studies challenge the conventional wisdom that American ideas and practices have dominated globally. Editors Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski and their contributors suggest that to understand legal education and to respond thoughtfully to the mounting present-day challenges, it is essential to look beyond a particular region and consider not only the ideas behind legal education but also the broader historical, political, and cultural factors that have shaped them. American Legal Education Abroad begins with an important foundational history by leading Harvard Law School historian Bruce Kimball, who explains the factors that created a transportable American legal model, and the book concludes with reflections from two prominent American law professors, Susan Carle and Bob Gordon, whose observations on recent disruptions within US law schools suggest that their influence within the global order of legal education may soon fall into further decline. This book should be considered an invaluable resource for anyone in the field of law.

This book explains how the debate over originalism emerged from the interaction of constitutional theory, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and American political development. Refuting the contention that originalism is a recent concoction of political conservatives like Robert Bork, Johnathan O'Neill asserts that recent appeals to the origin of the Constitution in Supreme Court decisions and commentary, especially by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, continue an established pattern in American history. Originalism in American Law and Politics is distinguished by its historical approach to the topic. Drawing on constitutional commentary and treatises, Supreme Court and lower federal court opinions, congressional hearings, and scholarly monographs, O'Neill's work will be valuable to historians, academic lawyers, and political scientists.

This study proposes a multilateralist method of choice of law in order to alleviate the great disarray that currently exists in American choice law. In the early 20th century, there was a fairly-uniform multilateralist method of choice law. In the 1920s and 30s, however, scholars adn courts began to reject this method. Viewed as too mechanical the method sometimes resulted in the choice of law of a state with only a tenuous connection to the controversy. Currently, state courts use four different approached to choice law with numerous material variations. This study rejects these approaches on normative, constitutional, and practical grounds. Instead, it advocates that courts adopt a multilateralist approach to choice of law that is forum- and content-neutral and that respects the rights of both individuals and states. The study also argues that such an approach should satisfy a constitutional standard that requires a court not choose one state's law when another state has a significantly closer connection to controversy. The proposed method consists of two parts. The first part determines the states that have created legal relations applying to the dispute. When more than one state has created a legal realtions applying to the dispute. When more than one state has created a legal relation that applies to the controversy, the second part adopts the law of the state that had the closest connection. The study then applies the suggested method to numerous choice of law problems.

Presents an ambitious narrative and fresh re-assessment of common law and natural law's varied interactions in America, 1630 to 1930.