Subjects:

USA, Other Jurisdictions , Legal History

Contents:

1. Law, colonization, legitimation and the European background

Anthony Pagden

2. The law of Native Americans to 1815

Katherine A. Hermes

3. English settlement and local governance

Mary Sarah Bilder

4. Legal communications and imperial governance: British North America and Spanish America compared

Richard J. Ross

5. Regionalism in early American law

David Thomas Konig

6. Penality and the colonial project: crime, punishment and the regulation of morals in early America

Michael Meranze

7. Law, population, labor

Christopher Tomlins

8. The fragmented laws of slavery in the colonial and revolutionary eras

Sally E. Hadden

9. The transformation of domestic law

Holly Brewer

10. Law and religion in colonial America

Mark McGarvie and Elizabeth Mensch

11. The transformation of law and economy in early America

Bruce H. Mann

12. Law and commerce, 1580-1815

Claire Priest

13. Law and the origins of the American Revolution

Jack P. Greene

14. Confederation and constitution

Jack N. Rakove

15. The consolidation of the early Federal sytem, 1791-1812

Saul Cornell and Gerald Leonard

16. Magistrates, common law lawyers, legislators: the three legal systems of British America

James A. Henretta.

One of the most exciting recent trends in the history of American law has been the proliferation of scholarship on law in early America. Volume I of the Cambridge History of Law in America reaps the advantage of this proliferation, beginning the account of law in America with the very first moments of European colonization and settlement of the North American landmass. It follows those processes across two hundred years to the eventual creation and stabilization of the American republic.

The book discusses the place of law in regard to colonization and empire, indigenous peoples, government and jurisdiction, population migrations, economic and commercial activity, religion, the creation of social institutions, and revolutionary politics. American legal history long treated the era of the founding of the republic and the early nineteenth century as the beginning of American law. Volume I disputes that tendency and corrects it. The Cambridge History of Law in America has been made possible by the generous support of the American Bar Foundation.