American Legal History

American Legal History takes up law and the legal profession in American life from the Founding to the 20th century with readings from the primary sources and the scholarly literature. Our subjects will include the legal controversies over European empires in the New World; the legal disputes of the American Revolution; the law of capitalism and the law of slavery; the jurisprudence of the Civil War and Reconstruction; the rise of the modern state and its accompanying legal crises; the civil rights era and its aftershocks; mass incarceration and the question of the 'New Jim Crow.' We will read elite statements of the law from the U.S. Supreme Court and elsewhere, but we will also study the social history of the law from the bottom up perspective of those making rights claims in and out of court.