- The Accidental Republic
- John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
- The Common Law
Much more than an historical examination of liability, criminal law, torts, bail, possession and ownership, and contracts, The Common Law articulates the ideas and judicial theory of one of the greatest justices of the Supreme Court. The John Harvard Library presents a text that is, with occasional corrections of typographical errors, identical to that found in the first and all subsequent printings by Little, Brown.
- Paperback 2009
- The Constitution's Text in Foreign Affairs
- This book describes the constitutional law of foreign affairs derived from the historical understanding of the Constitution's text. Examining recurring foreign affairs controversies such as the power to enter armed conflict and the power to make and break treaties, and showing how the words, structure, and context of the Constitution can resolve pivotal court cases and modern disputes, the author provides a counterpoint to more conventional discussions that tend to downplay the guiding ability of the Constitution.
- Hardcover 2007
- Deportation Nation
- We are a nation of immigrants--but which ones do we want, and what do we do with those that we don't? These questions have troubled American law and politics since colonial times. This book is a chilling history of communal self-idealization and self-protection. By illuminating the shadowy corners of American history, Kanstroom shows that deportation has long been a legal tool to control immigrants' lives and is being used with increasing crudeness in a globalized but xenophobic world.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence
- Essential reading for lawyers, judges, and expert witnesses in DNA cases, The Double Helix and the Law of Evidence is an informative and provocative contribution to the interdisciplinary study of law and science. Bridging law, genetics, and statistics, this book is an authoritative history of the long and tortuous process by which DNA science has been integrated into the American legal system.
- Hardcover 2010
- The Failure of the Founding Fathers
- Based on seven years of archival research, the book describes previously unknown aspects of the electoral college crisis of 1800, presenting a revised understanding of the early days of two great institutions that continue to have a major impact on American history: the plebiscitarian presidency and a Supreme Court that struggles to put the presidency's claims of a popular mandate into constitutional perspective. Through close studies of two Supreme Court cases, Ackerman shows how the court integrated Federalist and Republican themes into the living Constitution of the early republic.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- The Gift of Science
- Moving from the scientific revolution to the nineteenth-century rise of legal codes, Berkowitz tells the story of how lawyers and philosophers invented legal science to preserve law's claim to moral authority. The "gift" of science, however, proved bittersweet. Instead of strengthening the bond between law and justice, the subordination of law to science transformed law from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends.
- Hardcover 2005
- Her Day in Court
- This book is a study of the historical record of the property rights and equity of Muslim women. Based on Islamic court documents of fifteenth-century Granada--documents that show a high degree of women's involvement--the book examines women's legal entitlements to acquire property, as well as the social and economic significance of these rights to Granada's female population and, by extension, to women in other Islamic societies.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Hidden Holmes
- Oliver Wendell Holmes is the acknowledged source of twentieth-century tort law, but David Rosenberg, in this bold book, takes sharp issue with the current portrayal of Holmes as a legal formalist in torts who opposed the notion of strict liability and dogmatically advocated a universal rule of negligence, primarily to subsidize industrial development.
- Hardcover
- Holmes-Pollock Letters
- Hardcover
- How the Indians Lost Their Land
- Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth, nearly all the land in the United States was transferred from American Indians to whites. How did Indians actually lose their land? Stuart Banner argues that neither simple coercion nor simple consent reflects the complicated legal history of land transfers. Instead, time, place, and the balance of power between Indians and settlers decided the outcome of land struggles.
- Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2007
- The Human Measure
- Hardcover
- Islamic Legal Interpretation
- The world knows of Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa in the Salman Rushdie case, yet this key institution in Muslim society has not been the subject of a major examination until now. Islamic Legal Interpretationoffers a casebook of interdisciplinary analyses of fatwas over a wide range of times and places.
- Hardcover 1996
- John Brown's Trial
- Mixing idealism with violence, abolitionist John Brown cut a wide swath across the United States before winding up in Virginia, where he led an attack on the U.S. armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Supported by a “provisional army” of 21 men, Brown hoped to rouse the slaves in Virginia to rebellion. But he was quickly captured and, after a short but stormy trial, hanged on December 2, 1859. Brian McGinty provides the first comprehensive account of the trial, which raised important questions about jurisdiction, judicial fairness, and the nature of treason under the American constitutional system.
- Hardcover 2009
- Justice in Blue and Gray
- Stephen Neff offers the first comprehensive study of the wide range of legal issues arising from the American Civil War, many of which resonate in debates to this day. This book not only provides an accessible and informative legal portrait of this critical period but also illuminates how legal issues arise in a time of crisis, what impact they have, and how courts attempt to resolve them.
- Hardcover 2010
- Law and Judicial Duty
- Philip Hamburger's Law and Judicial Duty traces the early history of what is today called “judicial review.” The book sheds new light on a host of misunderstood problems, including intent, the status of foreign and international law, the cases and controversies requirement, and the authority of judicial precedent. The book is essential reading for anyone concerned about the proper role of the judiciary.
- Hardcover 2008
- Law and Letters in American Culture
- Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
- Law’s Quandary
- This lively book reassesses a century of jurisprudential thought from a fresh perspective, and points to a malaise that currently afflicts not only legal theory but law in general. Smith argues that our legal vocabulary and methods of reasoning presuppose classical ontological commitments that were explicitly articulated by thinkers from Aquinas to Coke to Blackstone, and even by Joseph Story. But these commitments are out of sync with the world view that prevails today in academic and professional thinking. So our law-talk thus degenerates into "just words"--or a kind of nonsense.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007
- Lincoln and the Court
- In a meticulously researched and engagingly written narrative, McGinty rescues the story of Abraham Lincoln and the Supreme Court from long and undeserved neglect, recounting the compelling history of the Civil War president's relations with the nation's highest tribunal and the role it played in resolving the agonizing issues raised by the conflict.
- Hardcover 2008 / Paperback 2009
- The Lost Promise of Civil Rights
- Goluboff offers a provocative new account of the history of American civil rights law long dominated by Brown v. Board of Education. Since 1954, generations have viewed civil rights as a matter of breaking down formal legal barriers to integration, especially in public education. By uncovering the challenges workers and their lawyers launched against Jim Crow in the 1940s, when civil rights were legally, conceptually, and constitutionally up for grabs, Goluboff shows how Brown only partially fulfilled the lost promise of civil rights.
- Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2009
- Man and Wife in America
- Exploring a century and a half of American marriage, Henrik Hartog shatters the myth of a golden age of stable marriage in the nineteenth-century. He describes the myriad ways the law shaped and defined marital relations, and how individuals manipulated the rules of the American states to fit their needs. Hartog shows how our own conflicts and confusions about marital roles and identities are rooted in the history of marriage and the legal struggles that defined and transformed it.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Patriots and Cosmopolitans
- Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, John Fabian Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics. In their own way, each of these individuals came up against the power of American national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.
- Hardcover 2007
- Possessing the Pacific
- Banner tells the story of colonial settlement in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. Possessing the Pacific is an original and broadly conceived study of how colonial struggles over land still shape the relations between whites and indigenous people throughout much of the world.
- Hardcover 2007
- The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire
- This book examines the first great law and economics movement in the early part of the twentieth century through the work of one of its most original thinkers, Robert Hale. Today, Hale is best known among contemporary legal academics and philosophers for his groundbreaking writings on coercion and consent in market relations. The bulk of his writing, however, consisted of a critique of natural property rights.
- Hardcover 1998 / Paperback 2001
- Separating Power
- The separation of powers along functional lines--legislative, executive, and judicial--has been a core concept of American constitutionalism since the Revolution. In Separating Power, Gerhard Casper offers a clear portrait of the issues of separation of power in the founding period, as well as a suggestion that in modern times we should be reluctant to tie separation of powers notions to their own procrustean bed.
- Hardcover 1997
- Settler Sovereignty
- In a brilliant comparative study of law and imperialism, Lisa Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in everyday contests between settlers and indigenous people in early national Georgia and the colony of New South Wales. In both places, settler sovereignty emerged when, at the same time in history, settlers rejected legal pluralism and moved to control or remove indigenous peoples.
- Hardcover 2010
- The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008
In this engaging—and disturbing—book, a leading historian of the Court reveals the close fit between its decisions and the nation’s politics. Drawing on more than four decades of thinking about the Supreme Court and its role in the American political system, this book offers a new, clear, and troubling perspective on American jurisprudence, politics, and history.
- Hardcover 2009
- To Keep and Bear Arms
- Joyce Malcolm illuminates the historical facts underlying the current passionate debate in America about gun-related violence, the Brady Bill, and the National Rifle Association, revealing the original meaning and intentions behind the individual right to "bear arms."
- Paperback 1996 / Hardcover
- Towards Juristocracy
- Drawing upon a comprehensive comparative inquiry into the political origins and legal consequences of the recent constitutional revolutions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hirschl shows that the trend toward constitutionalization is hardly driven by politicians' genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened economic and political elites, attempting to insulate policymaking from the vicissitudes of democratic politics.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007
- The Transatlantic Constitution
- Departing from traditional approaches to colonial legal history, Mary Sarah Bilder argues that American law and legal culture developed within the framework of an evolving, unwritten transatlantic constitution that lawyers, legislators, and litigants on both sides of the Atlantic understood. The central tenet of this constitution--that colonial laws and customs could not be repugnant to the laws of England but could diverge for local circumstances--shaped the legal development of the colonial world.
- Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2008
- Transformations in American Legal History
During his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. In this book, Horwitz’s students re-examine legal history from America’s colonial era to the late twentieth century. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.
- Hardcover 2009
- The Warren Court and American Politics
- In a learned and lively narrative discussing over 200 significant rulings, Lucas Powe explores why the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren was the most revolutionary and controversial Supreme Court in American history. Challenging the reigning consensus that the Warren Court, fundamentally, was protecting minorities, Lucas Powe looks at the Supreme Court in the wide political environment to find the Warren Court to be a functioning partner in Kennedy-Johnson liberalism.
- Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
- Wild Beasts and Idle Humors
- Wild Beasts and Idle Humours takes readers on an illuminating journey through the changing historical landscape of human nature and offers an unprecedented look at the legal conceptions of insanity from the pre-classical Greek world to the present. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of thinking about legal insanity.
- Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998