"How Tax Law Made America Modern": Schmidt on Mehrotra

Over at JOTWELL, Christopher Schmidt (IIT Chicago Kent College of Law) writes in praise of Ajay Mehrotra's new book, Making the Modern American Fiscal State: Law, Politics, and the Rise of Progressive Taxation, 1877-1929 (2013). (We've noted the book here, and you'll be hearing more about it in March, when Professor Mehrotra joins us a guest blogger.) Here's the first paragraph Schmidt's short review essay:

Ajay Mehrotra’s new book, Making the Modern American Fiscal State, describes how the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the way it taxed its citizens and thereby laid the foundation for new forms of governance and new sensibilities about the network of civic obligations that bound the nation together. This is a truly impressive work of legal historical scholarship—thoroughly researched, well written, and powerfully argued. Mehrotra also offers a masterful demonstration of scholarly synthesis, artfully weaving together an intricate tapestry of economics, politics, law, and social history.

Read on here.