This course examines law and the legal profession in American life, concentrating on the period from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Revolution. Our subjects will include the law of empire in the New World; the legalities of the American Revolution; citizenship and the franchise; gender, marriage, and feminism; capitalism and slavery; the jurisprudence of the Civil War and Reconstruction; the organization of labor and the rise of big business; Progressivism and the emergence of the administrative state; civil rights, civil liberties, and social movements; mass incarceration and the “New Jim Crow.” The readings will consider these legal developments and their impacts from a variety of perspectives, encompassing the views of leading lawyers, judges, and other elites as well as those marginalized and excluded from positions of power in the United States. Using history as a means of interrogating the relationship between law and American democracy, this course asks students to think critically about the dynamics between legal and social change. The aim is not only to reconstruct the legal past but also to assess the ways history can inform the legal controversies of our own times. No previous background in American history is assumed.
