Intended for the general public, the readings in this collection explore the roots of American law from pre-history to ancient Greece and Rome and the common law of England. America's legal development is traced from the drafting of the Constitution to the Rehnquist Court. Themes along the way include the ?Golden Age? of the early nineteenth century, when American law took on its distinctive character, the impact of slavery and the Civil War, and the struggles of the Progressives to regulate the nation's industrialized economy between the post-Civil War era and the New Deal. A reading on the Nuremberg Trials introduces the theme of international human rights, while post-war readings trace the nation's legal confrontations over civil liberties, civil rights, the rights of women, the protection of the environment, and legal protections for those accused of crimes. Dramatic highlights include the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War, the trial of the ?Chicago Eight? during the Vietnam War, and the Watergate scandal. Leading personalities include Sirs Edward Coke and William Blackstone in England, Chief Justices John Marshall and Earl Warren, Justices Stephen J. Field, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis D. Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter, and Judge Learned Hand. Readings on the future of American law explore the impact of alternative dispute resolution, science and technology, globalization, and space exploration, as well as trends in the legal profession and in legal philosophy.

The Spirit of the Common Law is one of Roscoe Pound's most notable works. It contains the brilliant lectures he delivered at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1921. It is a seminal book embodying the spiritual essence of sociological jurisprudence by its leading prophet. This work is both a celebration of the common law and a warning for common law judges and lawyers to return to and embrace the pragmatism and judicial empiricism that define and energize the common law. The two fundamental doctrines of the common law, Pound writes, are the doctrine of precedents and the doctrine of supremacy of law.In an earlier preface, Justice Arthur J. Goldberg writes that The Spirit of the Common Law will always be treasured by judges and lawyers for its philosophy and history, but more importantly for Roscoe Pound's optimism and faith in the capacity of law to keep up with the times without sacrificing fundamental values. It is a faith built upon the conviction that the present is not to be divorced from the past, but rather that the past and the present are to be built upon to make a better future. Neil Hamilton and Mathias Alfred Jaren provide a biographical introduction to the book. They discuss the various influences upon Pound's scholarly pursuits and they analyze many of his writings that led up to The Spirit of the Common Law. This volume is a necessary addition to the libraries of legal scholars and professionals, sociologists, and philosophers.

This book is the first to gather in a single volume concise biographies of the most eminent men and women in the history of American law. Encompassing a wide range of individuals who have devised, replenished, expounded, and explained law, The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law presents succinct and lively entries devoted to more than 700 subjects selected for their significant and lasting influence on American law. Casting a wide net, editor Roger K. Newman includes individuals from around the country, from colonial times to the present, encompassing the spectrum of ideologies from left-wing to right, and including a diversity of racial, ethnic, and religious groups. Entries are devoted to the living and dead, the famous and infamous, many who upheld the law and some who broke it. Supreme Court justices, private practice lawyers, presidents, professors, journalists, philosophers, novelists, prosecutors, and others--the individuals in the volume are as diverse as the nation itself. Entries written by close to 600 expert contributors outline basic biographical facts on their subjects, offer well-chosen anecdotes and incidents to reveal accomplishments, and include brief bibliographies. Readers will turn to this dictionary as an authoritative and useful resource, but they will also discover a volume that delights and entertains. Listed in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law: John Ashcroft Robert H. Bork Bill Clinton Ruth Bader Ginsburg Patrick Henry J. Edgar Hoover James Madison Thurgood Marshall Sandra Day O'Connor Janet Reno Franklin D. Roosevelt Julius and Ethel Rosenberg John T. Scopes O. J. Simpson Alexis de Tocqueville Scott Turow And more than 700 others

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.

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.

This is the first book on Korean legal history in English written by a group of leading scholars from around the world. The chapters set forth the developments of Korean law from the Chosŏn to colonial and modern periods through the examination of codified laws, legal theories and practices, and jurisprudence. The contributors’ shared premise is that the evolution of Korean law can be best understood when viewed in terms of its interactions with outside laws. Each chapter integrates literature in Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Western languages into comprehensive analyses to make up-to-date research available to readers both inside and outside Korea. This volume provides a solid framework from which to approach Korean legal history in the perspective of comparative legal traditions.

The author explores the interaction between the Constitution and religious practices in public life. School prayer, religion in prison, and same-sex marriages have created controversies challenging the Supreme Court and the nature of laws regarding religion. The author addresses such issues to trace the relationship between church and state.

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.