History of American Law

Catalog description

This course will weave together the history of U.S. legal and constitutional thought with the role that law has played in social and political change and in everyday life. It will consider a wide variety of texts and events but will concentrate on: colonial antecedents; revolution and the U.S. Constitution; the golden age of American law; courts and the rise of industrial capitalism; Black slavery and freedom; achievements and limits of liberal legal reform; the experience of the women's, labor, and civil rights movements; and legal realism and theories of the administrative state.