Cooley’s 1868 Constitutional Limitations was the century’s most influential book in its own time.

Evidence

More lasting and important work was written by constitutional theorists. If Holmes’s Common Law was the most important nineteenth-​century book, from the twentieth-​century standpoint, Thomas M. Cooley’s Constitutional Limitations, written in 1868, was the most important book in its own time. Its full title was: A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union. Benjamin Twiss has claimed that Cooley’s book supplied “capitalism … with a legal 56 Quoted in Howe, op. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3598

Categorization

• XREF: Cooley’s treatise underpins the judicial-review chapters (ch52) on courts striking down state economic regulation—a live institution-theory thread.