Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937

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“What an exciting book! It is bold, it is intellectually daring, it is astonishingly original. It is also very well written. I predict that it will become an important piece of intellectual-legal history and will frame the historical debate about many of the subjects covered for years to come… No one who knows legal history as well as Hovenkamp does has ever remotely attained a simultaneous level of sophistication about the history of economic theory. The juxtaposition of the two produces an incredibly integrated and powerful picture of the sources of legal ideas about the corporation, monopoly and the railroad problems and regulation.”—Morton J. Horwitz, Harvard Law School

“The text has strength both in its general and in its specific character. The general theme is important for the history of key elements of U.S. public policy toward the economy through a century of headlong growth and turbulence. The central concern of the text is to identify what are at least similarities and may be cause-effect interplay between what political economists wrote and what official policy makers did. In pursuing this general theme the text offers many illuminating or provocative insights.”—Willard Hurst, University of Wisconsin Law School