In the latest issue of
Common-place, you'll find a
review of
Law's Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press), by
Steven Wilf. Here's an excerpt from the
review, by
Michael McDonnell (University of Sydney, Australia).
In this lively little book, Steven Wilf, the Joel Barlow Professor of
Law at the University of Connecticut, encourages Americans to re-imagine
a time when legal discourse was not just confined to the courts. Since
the nineteenth century, most ideas about the legal legacy of the
American Revolution have put the Constitution front and center,
privileged the story of the rise of court-based jurisprudence, and
especially the importance of constitutional interpretation through
judicial review. The Revolution, the story goes, created a nation
dedicated to the rule of law. Yet in a provocative cultural and literary
analysis, Wilf compels us to look closely at the proliferation of "law
talk" across the colonies in the era of the American Revolution—a legal
language that was both elite and popular, spanned different forms of
expression from words to rituals, and drew on fictive and real ideas of
law. And, because this law talk emerged simultaneously with the imperial
crisis, a "revolutionary legal language became intimately intertwined
with politics" and transformed America's legal institutions. While we
may now remember a less contentious outcome, Wilf makes a compelling
case that we would do well to recall the "untidy" origins of American
law in an era when the Constitution is America's "most important export"
(195).
Read on
here.
