In this integration of law and economic ideas, Herbert Hovenkamp charts the evolution of the legal framework that regulated American business enterprise from the time of Andrew Jackson through the first New Deal. He reveals the interdependent relationship between economic theory and law that existed in these decades of headlong growth and examines how this relationship shaped both the modern business corporation and substantive due process. Classical economic theory--the cluster of ideas about free markets--became the guiding model for the structure and function of both private and public law. Hovenkamp explores the relationship of classical economic ideas to law in six broad areas related to enterprise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He traces the development of the early business corporation and maps the rise of regulated industry from the first charterbased utilities to the railroads. He argues that free market political economy provided the intellectual background for constitutional theory and helped define the limits of state and federal regulation of business behavior. The book also illustrates the unique American perspective on political economy reflected in the famous doctrine of substantive due process. Finally, Hovenkamp demonstrates the influence of economic theory on labor law and gives us a reexamination of the antitrust movement, the most explicit intersection of law and economics before the New Deal. Legal, economic, and intellectual historians and political scientists will welcome these trenchant insights on an influential period in American constitutional and corporate history.

In the first of the three volumes of his projected comprehensive narrative history of the role of law in America from the colonial years through the twentieth century, G. Edward White takes up the central themes of American legal history from the earliest European settlements through the Civil War. Included in the coverage of this volume are the interactions between European and Amerindian legal systems in the years of colonial settlement; the crucial role of Anglo-American theories of sovereignty and imperial governance in facilitating the separation of the American colonies from the British Empire in the late eighteenth century; the American "experiment" with federated republican constitutionalism in the founding period; the major importance of agricultural householding, in the form of slave plantations as well as farms featuring wage labor, in helping to shape the development of American law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the emergence of the Supreme Court of the United States as an authoritative force in American law and politics in the early nineteenth century; the interactions between law, westward expansion, and transformative developments in transportation and communiciation in the antebellum years; the contributions of American legal institutions to the dissolution of the Union of American states in the three decades after 1830; and the often-overlooked legal history of the Confederacy and Union governments during the Civil War. White incorporates recent scholarship in anthropology, ethnography, and economic, political, intellectual and legal history to produce a narrative that is both revisionist and accessible, taking up the familiar topics of race, gender, slavery, and the treatment of native Americans from fresh perspectives. Along the way he provides a compelling case for why law can be seen as the key to understanding the development of American life as we know it. Law in American History, Volume 1 will be an essential text for both students of law and general readers.

Two late Victorian ideas disrupted American legal thought: the Darwinian theory of evolution and marginalist economics. The legal thought that emerged can be called 'neoclassical', because it embodied ideas that were radically new while retaining many elements of what had gone before. Although Darwinian social science was developed earlier, in most legal disciplines outside of criminal law and race theory marginalist approaches came to dominate. This book carries these themes through a variety of legal subjects in both public and private law.

After thirty years, the debate over antitrust's ideology has quieted. Most now agree that the protection of consumer welfare should be the only goal of antitrust laws. Execution, however, is another matter. The rules of antitrust remain unfocused, insufficiently precise, and excessively complex. The problem of poorly designed rules is severe, because in the short run rules weigh much more heavily than principles. At bottom, antitrust is a defensible enterprise only if it can make the microeconomy work better, after accounting for the considerable costs of operating the system. The Antitrust Enterprise is the first authoritative and compact exposition of antitrust law since Robert Bork's classic The Antitrust Paradox was published more than thirty years ago. It confronts not only the problems of poorly designed, overly complex, and inconsistent antitrust rules but also the current disarray of antitrust's rule of reason, offering a coherent and workable set of solutions. The result is an antitrust policy that is faithful to the consumer welfare principle but that is also more readily manageable by the federal courts and other antitrust tribunals.

A history of the law governing the earliest stock markets in England and the United States.

The field of business history has changed and grown dramatically over the last few years. There is less interest in the traditional `company-centred' approach and more concern about the wider business context. With the growth of multi-national corporations in the 1980s, international and inter-firm comparisons have gained in importance. In addition, there has been a move towards improving links with mainstream economic, financial and social history through techniques and outlook. The International Bibliography of Business History brings all of the strands together and provides the user with a comprehensive guide to the literature in the field. The Bibliography is a unique volume which covers the depth and breadth of research in business history. This exhaustive volume has been compiled by a team of subject specialists from around the world under the editorship of three prestigious business historians.

Business firms are ubiquitous in modern society, but an appreciation of how they are formed and for what purposes requires an understanding of their legal foundations. This book provides a scholarly and yet accessible introduction to the legal framework of modern business enterprises. It explains the legal ideas that allow for the recognition of firms as organizational "persons" having social rights and responsibilities. Other foundational ideas include an overview of how the laws of agency, contracts, and property fit together to compose the organized "persons" known as business firms. The institutional legal theory of the firm developed embraces both a "bottom-up" perspective of business participants and a "top-down" rule-setting perspective of government. Other chapters in the book discuss the features of limited liability and the boundaries of firms. A typology of different kinds of firms is presented ranging from entrepreneurial one-person start-ups to complex corporations, as well as new forms of hybrid social enterprises. Practical applications include contribution to the debates surrounding corporate executive compensation and political free-speech rights of corporations.

Not since Edward Mason's classic book The Corporation in Modern Society appeared in 1959 has anyone compiled an authoritative overview of the American business firm. Such a survey is now clearly overdue, for in the last thirty years both the corporation and the business environment has changed radically. In The American Corporation Today, Carl Kaysen and other leading students of business and markets from around the country provide a much-needed analysis of American corporate life at the end of the century. Here is the American corporation from every angle--its postwar history, its relation to the law, its financing, its impact on technological innovation, its role as employer and as political force, and much more. The contributors--all of whom are recognized experts in their fields--not only tackle many of the same key areas that the contributors to Mason's classic study looked at, but they also illuminate issues that have only arisen in recent years. For instance, Raymond Vernon describes the increasing globalization of American business, where the net income from operations outside the U.S. is now nearly half of that from domestic operations (as opposed to one-tenth in the 1950s). James Q. Wilson traces how the corporation has become a full-time political actor, showing how it reinvented its political strategy and tactics in the 1960s in the face of a wave of new consumer, environmental, and worker health legislation. Gregory Acs and Eugene Steuerle show how the corporation promotes the commonweal, acting as agent for the employee in purchasing pension, health, and other welfare benefit plans, while Lester Thurow casts a critical eye at the decline of median real wages of American males over the last twenty years (never before have a majority of American workers suffered real wage reductions while the real per capita gross domestic product was increasing). In other pieces, corporate finance experts Charles Calomiris and Carlos Ramirez advocate removing legal constraints on financial institutions that prevent them from providing the full range of business financing from short-term debt to equity, Michael Useem looks at the rise of education and training as a vexing corporate issue, and Barbara Bergmann discusses the increasingly diverse work force, arguing that ending bias is in the corporation's best interest. And finally Neil Harris provides a fascinating discussion of architecture, exploring how companies have become the principle patrons of important architecture since the 1950s. Vital to everyone concerned with American big business today, this collection is sure to become the new standard upon which future studies of the corporation will be built.

Through courtroom dramas from 1865 to 1920 - of men forced to jump from moving cars when trainmen refused to stop, of women emotionally wrecked from the trauma of nearly missing a platform or street, and women barred from first class ladies' cars because of the color of their skin - Barbara Welke offers a dramatic reconsideration of the critical role railroads, and streetcars, played in transforming the conditions of individual liberty at the dawn of the twentieth century. The three-part narrative, focusing on the law of accidental injury, nervous shock, and racial segregation in public transit, captures Americans' journey from a cultural and legal ethos celebrating manly independence and autonomy to one that recognized and sought to protect the individual against the dangers of modern life. Gender and race become central to the transformation charted here, as much as the forces of corporate power, modern technology and urban space.

American law in the twentieth century describes the explosion of law over the past century into almost every aspect of American life. Since 1900 the center of legal gravity in the United States has shifted from the state to the federal government, with the creation of agencies and programs ranging from Social Security to the Securities Exchange Commission to the Food and Drug Administration. Major demographic changes have spurred legal developments in such areas as family law and immigration law. Dramatic advances in technology have placed new demands on the legal system in fields ranging from automobile regulation to intellectual property. Throughout the book, Friedman focuses on the social context of American law. He explores the extent to which transformations in the legal order have resulted from the social upheavals of the twentieth century--including two world wars, the Great Depression, the civil rights movement, and the sexual revolution. Friedman also discusses the international context of American law: what has the American legal system drawn from other countries? And in an age of global dominance, what impact has the American legal system had abroad? This engrossing book chronicles a century of revolutionary change within a legal system that has come to affect us all.