At the recently concluded annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History, the 2014 Cromwell Book Prize was awarded to Yvonne Pitts, Purdue University, for Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky (Cambridge University Press). Here, courtesy of H-Law, is the citation:
Yvonne Pitts' Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky uses inheritance law to reveal patterns in law and society, legal history, and women's and gender history. By combining intensive research in local wills and appellate cases from Kentucky over the course of a century, Pitts combines a close reading of black-letter law with a subtle appreciation of the changing cultural contexts of inheritance in a febrile era of emancipation, rapid economic change, and the expansion of women's roles in politics and society. By focusing on inheritance cases that center on personal problems and family disputes, Pitts links them to structural changes in law and society. Her deep research into wills tracks how plain people understood the process of acquiring wealth and the even more problematic process of distributing it, and demonstrates how legal actors (lawyers, judges, courts and legal rules) both channeled individuals' interactions with the law and were in turn changed by those people. In particular, Pitts' focus on the issues of testamentary capacity and free will of individuals reveal the depth and continuity of gender equality in the legal culture, even after rights were granted to women.
