American Legal History A Very Short Introduction (Audible Audio Edition) G Edward White Jason Huggins Audible Studios Books
Download As PDF : American Legal History A Very Short Introduction (Audible Audio Edition) G Edward White Jason Huggins Audible Studios Books
Law has played a central role in American history. From colonial times to the present, law has not just reflected the changing society in which legal decisions have been made-it has played a powerful role in shaping that society, though not always in positive ways.
In this Very Short Introduction, eminent legal scholar G. Edward White - author of the ongoing, multi-volume Law in American History - offers a compact overview that sheds light on the impact of law on a number of key social issues. Rather than offer a straight chronological history, the audiobook instead traces important threads woven throughout our nation's past, looking at how law shaped Native American affairs, slavery, business, and home life, as well as how it has dealt with criminal and civil offenses.
White shows that law has not always been used to exemplary ends. For instance, a series of decisions by the Marshall court essentially marginalized Amerindians, indigenous people of the Americas, reducing tribes to wards of the government. Likewise, law initially legitimated slavery in the United States, and legal institutions, including the Supreme Court, failed to resolve the tensions stirred up by the westward expansion of slavery, eventually sparking the Civil War.
White also looks at the expansion of laws regarding property rights, which were vitally important to the colonists, many of whom left Europe hoping to become land owners; the evolution of criminal punishment from a public display (the stocks, the gallows) to a private prison system; the rise of tort law after the Civil War; and the progress in legal education, moving from informal apprenticeships and lax standards to modern law schools and rigorous bar exams.
In this illuminating look at the pivotal role of law in American life, White offers us an excellent first step to a better appreciation of the function of law in our society.
American Legal History A Very Short Introduction (Audible Audio Edition) G Edward White Jason Huggins Audible Studios Books
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American Legal History A Very Short Introduction (Audible Audio Edition) G Edward White Jason Huggins Audible Studios Books Reviews
Distinct moments in the formation of american legal system are pointed and explained in this short book. The historical landscape and its reflections in the law are explained in order to give the reader a comprehensive view of the field. With sections about natives tribes’ law, African-American traditions and distinct patterns of colonizations in America with its law developments, the book provides useful informations. Good overview. Readable introduction. Profitable reading.
Excellent!!!
As the author of numerous legal histories, including the first volume of a new multi volume treatise on American legal history, Professor White is eminently qualified to write this volume for Oxford's Very Short Introductions series. Rather than surveying the development of American legal doctrine across a wide variety of topics, though, White often chooses to focus on legal aspects of US history. The result is an uneven treatment that will likely provide his readers with some interesting material while leaving them wanting more, even when the necessarily short nature of the work is considered.
White devotes his early chapters to settlers' interactions with natives and the growth and development of slavery. He details how they used legal doctrines to define their relationships with both groups. It's not surprising, however, that they should do so. While law facilitated the desire of settlers to move west and push natives out of their way, there is nothing particularly interesting about the legal aspects employed in many cases. Also, while law DID make slavery possible, it also made emancipation possible. White also goes into detail about the law's role in other developments in US history that illustrate that law has always played an important role in America's history, but does not always explain why the law developed as it did.
The book improves when it moves to chapters devoted to specific areas of law such as property, torts, family law, and criminal law. Family law and torts are given good treatments, but property deserves a fuller explication of how a rapidly growing society led to the development of specific property doctrines and not others. In addition, there is virtually no coverage at all of constitutional law (the constitution is mostly mentioned as it touches on other matters, such as natives (Johnson v. McIntosh) or slavery (Dred Scott)), commercial law or civil procedure. On the other hand, for some reason, there is a nice treatment of the development of communications law from the days of radio to the present time. Intellectual property is mentioned only in general as facilitating innovation.
A particularly interesting chapter covers the role that lawyers have played in society and the changing ways that they have been educated and developed to meet that society's changing needs from larger numbers of lawyer with less formal legal knowledge to today's highly trained but very narrowly focused specialists. Jurisprudential developments, however, are not covered at all and readers will find no mention of such topics as law and economics, originalism, critical legal studies or gender related scholarship.
While the challenge of covering such an immense topic in such a short space is daunting, White's success in some areas indicates that it can be done if a uniform approach is taken. His switching between a US historical narrative that discusses the law's role and a more traditional approach that looks at particular areas in isolation results in an uneven treatment, leaving the reader more knowledgeable in certain areas than others. But, ultimately it's hard to understand whether this book is about the law's role in American history or the history of American law.
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