New from Lexington Books:
This work examines the intellectual motivations behind the
concept of “legal science”—the first coherent American jurisprudential
movement after Independence. Drawing mainly upon public, but also
private, sources, this book considers the goals of the bar’s
professional leaders who were most adamant and deliberate in setting out
their visions of legal science. It argues that these legal scientists
viewed the realm of law as the means through which they could express
their hopes and fears associated with the social and cultural promises
and perils of the early republic. Law, perhaps more so than literature
or even the natural sciences, provided the surest path to both national
stability and international acclaim. While legal science yielded the
methodological tools needed to achieve these lofty goals, its
naturalistic foundations, more importantly, were at least partly
responsible for the grand impulses in the first place. This book first
considers the content of legal science and then explores its application
by several of the most articulate legal scientists working and writing
in the early republic.
For decades the study of American legal history before the
Civil War has been dominated by two themes—the economic effect of
judicial decisions and the (largely quantitative) study of law and
society. In this important book Steven Macias revives a third major
theme: the intellectual history of law in the early nineteenth century.
Extending themes of Perry Miller, Robert Ferguson, and Michael Hoeflich
about law as a science, Macias focuses on four leading legal scientists:
Gulian Verplanck, Thomas Cooper, Hugh Legaré, and Joseph Story. He
reveals a range of sophisticated ideas about law, from Roman law to
commercial law, to jurisprudence held by writers from Massachusetts and
New York to South Carolina. Legal Science in the Early Republic
recovers the intellectual world of people who saw law as a science and
sought to use it to bring rationality and economic and moral progress to
the United States. This book expands dramatically the territory of
pre-Civil War legal history. These thinkers and their ideas need to be
talked about alongside the judges whose opinions pushed economic growth
and the humble people whose lives were shaped by criminal prosecutions
and civil adjudications. Only now can we see how the entire world of
law—from ideas to reality on the ground—fits together. -- Alfred L. Brophy
Professor
Stephen Macias has written an important and masterful account of the
development of legal science in antebellum America. His use of new
sources combined with a superb critical analysis make this book a must
read for anyone interested in the history of law. The book should be
read by every American historian concerned with the antebellum period
and should be assigned in every class concerned with the development of
the legal system in the United States. -- Michael H. Hoeflich
