American Legal History

Catalog description

This course explores major themes in the history of American law from the colonial period to the present: how American legal culture emerged out of an imperial background, was transformed amidst national expansion in the nineteenth century, and evolved in response to ideological and social pressures in the twentieth. The course focuses on law internally, looking at its personnel and sources, as well as externally, or how it relates to the larger social and political cultures around it. Recurrent themes include the adaptation of law as people move across space, the professional identity of the lawyer, the changing literary sources of law, the relative autonomy of law in relation to other cultural phenomena, and the power of law as an agent of social transformation.