Law in American History, Vol. I

"G. Edward White's first volume of Law in American History is an outstanding contribution to legal history. The book surveys the history of American law through the end of the Civil War in remarkable detail for a single-volume work." --Journal of American History "This is a magisterial account of a series of dramatic legal developments. Essential." --CHOICE "Never before has a work on American legal history engaged so profoundly with the distinctiveness of America's displacement of Indians and enslavement of Africans. This fascinating and original book will change the way the category 'American law' is defined."--Noah Feldman, Harvard Law School "In this ambitious and sweeping narrative of a formative era in American legal and constitutional history, White takes us a large step forward in our thinking about the relationships among law, politics, and culture."--Alison la Croix, University of Chicago Law School "Ted White is one of the few legal historians whose broad and deep knowledge of American law from the earliest years to the present might enable him to synthesize the American legal experience. This magnificent first volume of a multivolume history takes us up to the Civil War, and provides a compelling, coherent, challenging, and readable account of the first half of American legal history. Law in American History is the welcome culmination of a lifetime of scholarship."--Stanley n. Katz, Princeton University "White embeds American law in our culture and thus links legal doctrine and institutions to the ideas of freedom central to our nation's development. This is an authoritative work of American history, told through the framework of law."--Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill "In this wonderful volume, we see a masterful historian at the top of his game. White synthesizes and makes accessible a truly immense amount of material-making coherent evolving developments in (and interactions between) public and private law, courts and politics, and government and society."--Larry D. Kramer, Stanford Law School "White's first volume is as crisp and elegant a statement of the central themes in the history of American law as any I know. The pages move seamlessly from the law of everyday life in the household and the workplace to the great constitutional controversies of the day. This is a book that proceeds with refreshing candor and good common sense."--John Witt, Yale Law School "G. Edward White's first volume of Law in American History is an outstanding contribution to legal history. ... White's focus on legal, popular, and elite cultures permeates the entire tale told in this volume. He extends his inquiry to examine lawyers' professional culture, slave culture, their masters' culture, and that of abolitionists, workingmen, and indentured servants. It is these cultural themes that allow even the most seasoned of legal historians reading this book to see events in a new light. That altered vision whets the appetite for White's planned second volume to complete the story." --Journal of American History "G. Edward White is one of America's most eminent legal historians... [and] we now know more and have a truer understanding of the history of the law in America than we did before White began writing legal history forty years ago." --The New Republic