Inventing American Exceptionalism The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture 1800-1877.

Format:

Book

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Culture and law--United States.

Culture and law.

Law--United States--History--19th century.

Law.

Exceptionalism--United States.

Exceptionalism.

History.

United States.

Physical Description:

xi, 449 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified] : Yale Univ Pr, 2017.

Summary:

When Americans imagine their legal system, it IS the adversarial trial-dominated by dueling lawyers undertaking grand public performances-that first comes to mind. But as award-winning author Amalia Kessler reveals in this engrossing history, only in the turbulent decades before the Civil War did adversarialism become a defining American practice and ideology, displacing alternative, more judge-driven approaches to procedure. Drawing on a broad range of methods and sources-and recovering neglected influences (including from Europe)-Kessler shows how the emergence of American adversarial legal culture was a product not only of developments internal to law but also of wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural debates over whether and how to undertake market regulation and pursue racial equality. AS a result, adversarialism came to play a key role in defining American legal institutions and practices, as well as national identity. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

The "natural elevation" of equity : quasi-inquisitorial procedure and the early nineteenth-century resurgence of equity

A troubled inheritance : the English procedural tradition and its lawyer-driven reconfiguration in early nineteenth-century New York

The non-revolutionary field code : democratization, docket pressures, and codification

Cultural foundations of American adversarialism : civic republicanism and the decline of equity's quasi-inquisitorial tradition

Market freedom and adversarial adjudication : the nineteenth-century American debates over (European) conciliation courts and the problem of procedural ordering

The freedman's bureau exception : the triumph of due (adversarial) process and the dawn of Jim Crow

Conclusion: The question of American exceptionalism and the lessons of history.

ISBN:

9780300222258

0300222254

OCLC:

946481882