Lawrence M. Friedman — A History of American Law

328 published claims from this book.

• A federal ship-passenger cap aimed at Chinese arrivals was vetoed by Hayes
• A fifth of American children worked for pay by 1900
• A half-cent milk freight reduction made landmark constitutional history.
• A lethal 1948 smog event catalyzed decades of progressively stricter federal air pollution statutes
• A national market economy inherently generates demand for national-level regulation
• A private company came to organize the entire American case-law system
• A vigilante past was no career obstacle in nineteenth-century western politics
• Abortion criminalization was partly driven by nativist fear of immigrant population growth
• Actual court practice was freer than written procedural manuals suggest
• Admiralty loss-splitting and jury-free judging paralleled covert jury tort reasoning
• Agricultural and institutional differences made most English statutes useless in South Carolina
• Ambitious educated eastern lawyers migrated west seeking fortune
• America’s adversarial civil procedure won a contested victory over informal and inquisitorial rivals.
• America’s unenforced vice laws existed because all classes wanted official morality preserved
• American distrust of judges and juries drove the explosive complexity of evidence law.
• American eugenics served as a model for Nazi Germany
• American legal literature has always been rigorously practical, not theoretical
• American negotiable instruments law was more advanced than England’s
• American officials deliberately replaced civil law with common law in Missouri
• American regulation moved historically from local to state to federal control
• American settlement was a history of dispossessing native peoples
• American states frequently replaced whole constitutions rather than amend them
• Anti-Chinese violence killed hundreds and expelled thousands from western homes
• Anti-dynastic trust law reflected market ideology, not hostility to wealth
• Anti-dynasty sentiment drove adoption of estate and inheritance taxes after 1885
• Apparent opposites in land law actually served one developmental goal
• Arid western states replaced riparian doctrine with prior appropriation water rights
• Armed labor revolts, not reform sentiment, ended convict leasing in the South
• Bankruptcy laws function as safety nets that encourage commercial risk-taking.
• Bans on local legislation were easily evaded through single-member city classes
• Bar openness coexisted with class stratification even in the nineteenth century
• Bar preparation requirements weakened across the nineteenth century
• Bar rigor campaigns mixed public interest with supply-control motives
• British ‘constructive imperialism’ strengthened London’s control but ultimately failed.
• California adopted the common law by statute in 1850 over civil-law objections
• Caveat emptor simplified commerce by discouraging litigation
• Chinese exclusion laws forced immigrants to fabricate paper families to prove citizenship.
• Clerkship apprenticeship doubled as a bar admission control device
• Cold War embarrassment and northern black migration forced the desegregation of the armed forces.
• Colfax massacre killers all went free despite federal prosecutions
• Colonial adoption of English legal doctrines was driven by local elites, not imperial fiat.
• Colonial bar admission was fragmented and colony-specific before 1776
• Colonial courts combined all government powers without separating them.
• Colonial criminal codes prioritized economically vital commodities in setting punishments
• Colonial criminal law was notably less bloodthirsty than England’s
• Colonial elite lawyers resented amateur competitors for fees and status
• Colonial indenture served as a flexible legal device far beyond labor
• Colonial land law radically simplified English doctrine
• Colonial married women used trusts to circumvent coverture’s property rules
• Colonial objections to admiralty courts were about substance, not procedure, as the Revolution proved.
• Colonial poor relief was local, stingy, and shifted costs onto newcomers through warning out
• Colonial statute borrowing made Massachusetts and Virginia legal exporters
• Colonies codified law because the uncodified common law was not packaged for export
• Colorado’s legislature retroactively ratified informal miners’ court judgments
• Commercial complexity made lawyers indispensable despite colonial hostility
• Commercial failure lost moral stigma in nineteenth-century America’s growth economy.
• Commercial law shifted from merchants to broad market participants
• Common law survived because abandoning it was practically impossible
• Common law was ideologically justified as protecting free trade
• Complex English conveyancing rules were intolerable in America’s mass land market
• Confederate reliance on printed money caused runaway inflation
• Confirming Mexican-era land titles in California took seventeen years on average
• Connecticut’s 1650 code was overwhelmingly copied from Massachusetts
• Constitutional protections failed to prevent police violence that fueled Black Lives Matter.
• Constitutional voting amendments were worthless without enforcement against southern disfranchisement.
• Continuing business relations avoided courts in favor of private settlement and arbitration
• Contract doctrine anchored both constitutional liberty theory and legal education
• Control over suffrage was the key lever of political power
• Cooley’s 1868 Constitutional Limitations was the century’s most influential book in its own time.
• Court appointees grew older as the nation matured
• Courts read charters narrowly to let new enterprises displace vested monopolies
• Courts stretched ‘in course of employment’ statutes through interpretive flexibility
• Criminal lawyers advertise because they lack repeat business
• Crises drive reactive lawmaking while slow social shifts shape law durably
• Cultural redefinition of childhood, not work itself, made child labor a social injustice
• Dissenting opinions grew rapidly across the nineteenth century
• Dower declined because protecting widows conflicted with fluid land markets
• Early American commercial law was framed as international rather than parochial
• Early American patent law balanced innovation incentives against monopoly fears
• Early and mature colonies of different regions resemble each other more than contemporaries do.
• Early child labor statutes were unenforced symbolic gestures
• Early colonies actively banned paid lawyers
• Early federal bankruptcy acts were crisis-driven and short-lived
• Early nineteenth-century Americans expected state government to actively promote economic development
• Early nineteenth-century Americans feared corporations as soulless and immortal concentrations of greed.
• Early nineteenth-century courts reassigned the jury from community law-maker to fact-finder.
• Early nineteenth-century litigants were barred from testifying in their own lawsuits.
• Early Progressives joined reform movements out of idealist conviction, not self-interest
• Early state constitutions favored legislatures because governors embodied British rule
• Eighteenth-century lawyers drew attack from both classes and crown alike
• Eighteenth-century Privy Council review was haphazard and tolerated most colonial statutory deviations.
• Elite lawyers blamed elective judiciaries for corrupt and ignorant judges
• Elites by the 1780s feared legislatures as threats to property rights
• Endorsements functioned as a private substitute for credit agencies
• England routed colonial appeals to the Privy Council, not royal courts, because politics dominated.
• English and American tort law grew independently from shared industrial causes
• Equality movements may stall but cannot reverse course entirely
• Equity’s jury-free flexibilities powered major late-nineteenth century judicial interventions.
• Eugenic hereditarian theory drove the anti-vice campaign’s scientific rationale
• Even conservative courts make decisions that expand individual rights dramatically
• Even modest income taxes can grow into transformative fiscal instruments
• Even unenforceable vice laws retained real deterrent bite through selective enforcement
• Exalting marriage as holy paradoxically raised the demand for divorce.
• Facially neutral ordinances enforced discriminatorily violate equal protection
• Failed court-packing attempts still worked as deterrence and delayed payoff
• Falling farmer influence and rising business power revived national bankruptcy law
• Farwell established that workers assumed job risks priced into their wages
• Fault-based divorce law produced collusive perjury in court
• Federal disaster relief predates the modern welfare state by over a century
• Federal law preserved some civil-law property rights during common-law expansion
• Federal surveys imposed a rectangular grid that shaped American settlement
• Federalism arguments are usually veils for substantive policy goals
• Federalism prevented any single state from resolving the divorce-law contradiction.
• Fewer than one percent of commuted homestead lands ever became homes
• Formal Jim Crow segregation laws emerged decades after Reconstruction, following custom
• Formal written jury instructions became opaque to the juries they supposedly guided.
• Forum choice between state and federal courts favored corporate defendants
• Free interstate mobility turned American states into competing sellers of laws
• Free labor united against convict labor as unfair competition
• Free northern states like Illinois erected legal barriers to black settlement
• Free speech doctrine strengthened across the twentieth century despite wartime repression
• Frontier judges avoided law questions and left decisions to juries
• Frontier lawyers subsisted chiefly on land and debt collection work
• Frontier lawyers were peripatetic, moving frequently between boomtowns
• Frontier territories evaded the requirement that they borrow preexisting state statutes wholesale.
• Germ theory expanded public demand for government health regulation
• Gilded Age courts approved professional cartels while striking labor laws
• Government growth stems from concrete group demands, not bureaucratic pathology
• Granger constitutions restricted legislatures out of fear that corporate power could buy lawmakers
• Hypertechnical procedural protections mainly served the few who could appeal, not most defendants.
• Impeachment removed corrupt New York judges in 1872
• Imprisonment for debt was abolished as economically wasteful, not only inhumane.
• In medieval England real property rights conferred political jurisdiction, not just ownership
• Independence triggered a major outburst of lawmaking in every state
• Indiana pioneered state sterilization in 1907 and many states followed
• Industrial calamities forced the creation of genuinely new tort law
• Industrial urbanization structurally compelled heavy investment in violent-crime control
• Industrialization created problems no single state could solve, forcing centralization
• Industrialization pushed big business out of regular contract litigation
• Insurance companies and contingent fees, not courts, drive auto accident resolution
• Interest-group membership functions as much to exclude outsiders as to unite insiders
• Jefferson’s list of grievances largely recycled his Virginia preamble with Massachusetts-based additions
• Jim Crow segregation extended even to the gallows and cemeteries
• Judge-made law can only change through actual litigated cases.
• Judicial opinion-writing shifted from creative grand style to formalist drabness by 1900.
• Judicial review made courts seem reactionary fortresses to labor and reformers
• Judicial review’s deterrent fear may explain American labor’s non-militancy
• Judicial review’s main effect was deterring legislation, not voiding it
• Key federal statutes responded to demands for a single national authority
• Killing a slave was not legally murder in early South Carolina
• Labor’s protective campaigns doubled as exclusionary racial and gender agendas
• Land’s dominance of national wealth made land law track the business cycle closely
• Langdell conceived law as a science whose primary sources are printed cases
• Langdell excluded even the ancient Statute of Frauds from his casebook
• Langdell replaced textbook lectures with Socratic casebook teaching
• Langdell’s curriculum excluded statutory and constitutional law as unscientific
• Langdell’s legal science was geometric deduction from cases, not empirical observation
• Langdell’s legal-science ideas made late-century legal scholarship inbred and free of social commentary.
• Large law firms came to dominate legal practice nationwide by 2000.
• Late-nineteenth-century courts functioned as a shield protecting established interests
• Late-nineteenth-century judges presented themselves as protectors of existing law rather than its builders.
• Late-nineteenth-century penal reforms shifted punishment from the offense to the offender
• Late-twentieth-century law decriminalized what Victorian vice laws had criminalized
• Law changes by layered accretion rather than revolutionary overhaul.
• Law is coextensive with society and mirrors its aims and contradictions
• Lawlessness by squatters forced Congress to legalize their claims in 1841
• Laws against sex and vice resurged strongly in late nineteenth-century America
• Lawyer unpopularity tracked the business cycle and debtor grievances
• Legal fictions once classified slaves as real estate and corporations as persons.
• Legal history is inseparable from the full history of society
• Legal structures both express and reinforce the distribution of power
• Legislative divorce vanished from American states by the late 1890s
• Literacy tests and poll taxes were written to let local officials disenfranchise black voters
• Litigation over costs batters originally simple legal concepts into intricate complexity
• Long judicial tenure occasionally left enfeebled justices deciding important cases
• Loose bar admission made law a channel of upward mobility
• Many small municipalities function as exclusionary wealth enclaves
• Married women’s property acts were a quiet change about external family economics
• Mass markets forced consumers to trust unseen strangers and corporations
• Migratory divorce mills moved from state to state as each tightened its laws.
• Most American law remains state law despite federal growth
• Most injured industrial workers received no compensation under nineteenth-century tort law
• Muller v. Oregon upheld sex-based hours limits on maternalist grounds
• Negotiability lets good-faith buyers take title free of prior claims
• New York never adopted Field’s proposed civil code despite decades of advocacy.
• New York’s feudal manors survived until the mid-nineteenth century
• Nineteenth-century chroniclers mythologized vigilantes as folk democracy and heroic surgeons of the body politic
• Nineteenth-century contract law expanded to serve the new market economy.
• Nineteenth-century county jails were filthier and more corrupting than state prisons
• Nineteenth-century courts let condemnors offset land-taking compensation against expected project benefits
• Nineteenth-century law schools were loosely tied to universities and required no college degree
• Nineteenth-century police functioned as municipal strikebreakers for management
• Nineteenth-century public generosity went only to blameless suffering groups
• No formula ever settled how states could apportion interstate business for taxation
• Obsolete common-law doctrines lingered for centuries rather than being abolished openly.
• Occupational licensing laws mainly served organized trades’ economic self-interest.
• Only export-protecting food bills passed before 1906
• Only two American colonies elected their own governors before independence
• Open interest-group politics rewarded organized voices while poor law stayed backward and cruel
• Organized crime predated and outlived Prohibition, which did not create it
• Pioneers conducted formal trials even beyond reach of any court
• Plessy’s majority dismissed segregation’s meaning as black misperception
• Police power let states regulate contracts for health, safety, or morality
• Popular legal treatises were continued after their authors died as valuable publisher brand names.
• Post-1837 state governments barred themselves from owning corporate stock and lending credit
• Post-Reconstruction white supremacy nearly eliminated black lawyers from the bar
• Printed reports let each state craft and borrow its own common law
• Prior appropriation doctrine subsidized industry by letting water be taken free
• Private title-insurance companies arose because public land records could not cope with volume
• Pro-enterprise tort rules reflected broad consensus rather than judicial conspiracy
• Professional civil-service experts acted as reform agents
• Professional ethics codes partly serve elite bar interests as anticompetitive rules.
• Progressive-era immigration law expressly excluded the diseased, criminal, illiterate, and Asiatic.
• Protective labor laws could cost women their jobs rather than help them
• Public housing lost middle-class support once it became poor-only housing
• Public opinion about railroads reversed from enthusiasm to fear within one generation
• Published case reports were justified as checks limiting judicial discretion
• Puerto Rico remains a constitutional limbo neither state nor colony
• Quitrents failed in America because land was abundant
• Railroad receiverships let federal judges suppress strikes through contempt power.
• Reconstruction-era southern states temporarily reversed the elective-judge trend
• Reform succeeded only where conscience aligned with self-interest
• Regulatory agencies drift toward the interests of the firms they regulate
• Regulatory crimes emerged to solve diffuse-harm enforcement problems no private litigant would pursue.
• Regulatory crimes served as cheap administrative enforcement for business regulation
• Regulatory laws took criminal form because private suits were impractical
• Religious prejudice in Supreme Court appointments collapsed completely within a century
• Reported appellate decisions vastly overstate how courts actually handled slave cases
• Reported case volumes began appearing in American states only after 1789
• Revolutionary-era lawyers led both sides of the political divide
• Rising divorce reflected bourgeois demand for formal record-keeping
• Rising racism in slave codes progressively degraded free blacks to near-slave status
• San Quentin’s chief surgeon experimented with testicular transplants on prisoners
• Separate-but-equal graduate schools failed because hastily created black institutions were never truly equal.
• Several northern states abolished the death penalty by the 1880s.
• Shared experience, not formal machinery, kept state laws from diverging into separate languages
• Shared social forces, not imitation, drove many liberation movements
• Single-subject clauses served open government but mainly armed judges
• South Carolina executed 296 slaves between 1800 and 1855
• South Carolina legally enslaved free black sailors entering its ports
• Southern constitutional disenfranchisement followed the retreat of federal racial-justice will
• Southern convict-leasing camps killed convicts at catastrophic rates
• Southern courts openly declared slaves outside the protection of common law
• Southern law did not protect enslaved families from forced separation by sale
• Southern secession removed the congressional opposition blocking free-land homestead legislation
• Southern slavery was a culture and social order, not only an economic system
• State and local administrative agencies long preceded the federal ICC
• State competition for business prevented progressive labor legislation before federal control
• State constitutions changed wholesale as public opinion shifted
• State court judicial review exploded from rare to common between 1850 and 1900
• State courts struck down debt-relief statutes to protect investment over indebted farmers
• State governments chartered corporate private police armies to crush organized labor
• State governments shifted power from legislatures to executives and courts over time
• Statehood produced legal continuity, not breakage, across the West
• States initially justified owning corporate stock on public-works and control grounds.
• States regulated insurance because federal government never did
• States weaponize legal difference to attract commerce as a wealth source
• States-rights arguments in Congress blocked federal anti-lynching legislation.
• Student control of law reviews originated early and has never been challenged
• Sunday-closing laws were backed by labor unions seeking a shorter workweek
• Supreme Court prestige rose steadily despite raw political appointment fights
• Supreme Court unanimity collapsed from near-total to under a quarter of decisions
• Technical state constitutional clauses gave state courts their main striking tools
• Temperance crusades enforced Protestant middle-class cultural dominance over Catholic immigrant working classes
• Tenement housing laws could not overcome underlying urban poverty
• Territorial judges, unlike federal judges, served short terms and could be fired at will
• Territorial legislatures inherited statutes useless to their local conditions
• The 1648 Laws and Liberties was an alphabetical compilation rather than a systematic code
• The 1837 depression turned states against direct railroad investment.
• The 1837 panic reversed state investment in railroads and forced privatization.
• The 1841 bankruptcy act let anyone self-file yet restricted forced filings to merchants.
• The 1841 bankruptcy act mainly discharged debts with creditors recovering pennies on the dollar.
• The 1898 bankruptcy act was debtor-favorable and proved permanent
• The 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide deaths created the modern FDA pre-approval requirement for new drugs
• The 1942 Coconut Grove fire yielded about $160 per victim despite 491 deaths
• The automobile generated the most familiar and most violated branch of law
• The case method taught one national common law by ignoring state-law diversity
• The Court eagerly broadened the Mann Act beyond its white-slavery purpose
• The fault principle shielded industry from full liability to spare capital
• The federal government grew seven-thousandfold in budget and fourteenfold in employees
• The GI Bill opened elite law schools to talented veterans regardless of class.
• The Harvard case method conquered American law teaching nationwide by 1903.
• The Homestead Act marked the end of using public land to raise federal revenue
• The Homestead Act never delivered free land to ordinary settlers
• The late-1800s trust scare concerned concentrated power, not legal form.
• The law merchant, absorbed from merchant courts, gave common law its commercial document doctrines.
• The lawyer population exploded tenfold relative to population after the Revolution
• The Mann Act became a weapon for racist and blackmail purposes
• The market for legal services disciplined entry when formal bar strictures collapsed
• The NAACP adopted federal litigation because every other political avenue was closed.
• The Negotiable Instruments Law achieved near-universal state adoption before the UCC replaced it
• The organized bar proved cowardly in crises despite its aggressive rhetoric about professional honor.
• The parol-evidence rule made written documents’ plain words bar contradicting oral promises.
• The practice of law shifted from courtroom litigation to transactional work
• The privacy tort began as a scholarly proposal adopted later by courts
• The Restatements descended from the codification movement yet were never binding law
• The Revolutionary generation knew judges made law through their ideology
• The silent penitentiary system collapsed from cost and overcrowding.
• The single-subject clause has voided dozens of state statutes
• The state compensated masters for executed slaves to prevent concealment of slave crime
• The statute of frauds survived as functional, not empty, formality
• The Supreme Court held that Congress lacked constitutional power over trademarks in 1879
• The Supreme Court sanctioned labor injunctions in the 1895 Debs case.
• The Thaw case made claimed seduction of young women a legal trial narrative
• The three-year law degree began at Harvard in the 1870s
• The United States overtook Britain in patent grants by 1807
• The western frontier originated lasting legal innovations that later spread east
• Thin legal libraries made frontier court law both freewheeling and archaic
• Title doctrine in sales law quietly favored sellers over buyers
• Towns litigated each other over pauper settlement to avoid paying relief costs
• Treatise authors and courts mutually reinforced each other through reciprocal citation
• Trials served as public entertainment before broadcast media existed
• Ultra vires doctrine collapsed because it hindered corporate flexibility
• Urbanization drove executions out of public view into prisons
• Utopian and godly colonial ideals structurally rejected lawyer mediation
• Vagrancy laws effectively criminalized male unemployment and homelessness
• Vice-admiralty courts spread through crown colonies from 1696 onward and tried cases without juries.
• Victorian America criminalized only public, notorious sin rather than private vice
• Victorian marriage norms structurally created a male demand prostitution filled
• Vigilante justice enforced elite moral codes rather than neutral popular will
• Wagon-train travelers obeyed law because courts awaited them at both ends
• Wealthy interests financed a staged lawsuit against the income tax
• Welfare benefits once granted to masses become politically irreversible
• Western codification changed legal practice surprisingly little once enacted
• Western lawyers pursued politics, land, and litigation as fortune routes
• Western states relaxed usury law to attract money for cheap land
• Widespread private land ownership shaped all American law
• Without national health insurance, welfare functions get absorbed piecemeal into existing institutions