Law in American history. Volume 2, From reconstruction through the 1920s

681 Pages·2016·3.658 MB·English

by  White, G. Edward

Law in American History,
Volume 2

Law in American
History, Volume 2
From Reconstruction Through the 1920s
G. EDWARD WHITE
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1
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ISBN 978– 0– 19– 993098– 2
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Printed by Sheridan, USA
For Susan Davis White
ALSO BY G. EDWARD WHITE
The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience (1968)
The American Judicial Tradition (1976)
Patterns of American Legal Thought (1978)
Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History (1980)
Earl Warren: A Public Life (1982)
The Marshall Court and Cultural Change (1988)
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self (1993)
Intervention and Detachment: Essays in Legal History and Jurisprudence (1994)
Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903– 1953 (1996)
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Sage of the Supreme Court (2000)
The Constitution and the New Deal (2000)
Alger Hiss’s Looking- Glass Wars (2004)
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (2006)
History and the Constitution: Collected Essays (2007)
Law in American History: Volume 1, From The Colonial Years
Through the Civil War (2012)
American Legal History: A Very Short Introduction (2014)
CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Civil Rights in the Reconstruction Era 6
2. Law and the Opening of the Transcontinental West 50
3. Foreign Relations Law and Policy from the Civil War
through the 1920s 89
4. The Transformation of American Immigration Law
and Policy 118
5. The Transformation of Nineteenth- Century Contract
and Commercial Law 169
6. The Evolving Law of Domestic Relations 207
7. The Emergence and Development of a Law of Torts 230
8. The Treatment of Crimes 281
9. The Emergence of Modern American Legal Education 312
10. The Supreme Court in the Era of Guardian Review I:
The Court’s Internal Work 349
11. The Supreme Court in the Era of Guardian Review II:
Antitrust and Economic Police Power Cases 379
12. The Supreme Court in the Era of Guardian Review III:
Race Relations Cases 424
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viii Contents
13. The Supreme Court in the Era of Guardian Review IV:
Free Speech Cases 495
14. Toward Modernity 549
Notes 555
Index 635
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As mass market writers and film makers know, sequels can cut both ways. On the
one hand, segments of the public may be eagerly awaiting the sequel because the
original work has been well received, and so something like a built- in audience
for the sequel exists. And if the sequel is regarded as even better than the original,
the audience may expand further, and with that expansion may come greater
opportunities for the work’s creator. On the other hand, if the sequel is generally
perceived as of lower quality than the original, there will be reputational costs
for the author of the work.
This book cannot properly be described as a sequel. It has almost an entirely
new set of characters, although some people introduced in Law and American
History:Volume 1 show up in this volume as well. It is hard to keep such figures as
John Marshall or Abraham Lincoln off the stage. Not to mention such inanimate
characters as the Constitution of the United States. But, on the whole, this book
introduces people and themes that were not present in the first volume of the
Law in American History trilogy.
Nevertheless the book discusses a fair number of legal issues that were part
of the corpus of law in American history from the colonial period through the
Civil War. It does so for two reasons. First, historical periodization is a some-
what arbitrary process, and although I believe there were good reasons for
ending Volume 1 with the Civil War, and there are good reasons for ending
this volume with the 1920s, the central issues of one period tended to flow, in
modified form, into another. Many of the chapters of this volume center upon
the transformation of the law and policy issues of several areas of American
law that gradually took place over the course of the nineteenth century. Thus,
strictly speaking, this is not a book exclusively about law in American history
from Reconstruction through the 1920s; it also contains numerous references
to, and analyses of, issues of law and policy that surfaced in the antebellum years
of American history.
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