Law Commons^™

Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld: On The Difficulty Of Becoming A Law Professor, John Henry Schlegel

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 18 in Wesley Hohfeld A Century Later: Edited Major Works, Select Personal Papers, and Original Commentaries, Shyam Balganesh, Ted Sichelman & Henry Smith, eds.

Wesley Hohfeld (1879 - 1918) is well known to legal philosophers and to property teachers for his table of fundamental conceptions, a terminological framework for understanding legal doctrine and reasoning. This work was also substantively important for some members of the American Legal Realist movement and Critical Legal Studies. More personally he was part of the generation of law teachers who had to figure out how to become a professional academic in the …

The Legal Profession: From The Revolution To The Civil War, Alfred S. Konefsky

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 3 in The Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume II, The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1920), Michael Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins, eds.

The American legal profession matured and came to prominence during the century prior to the Civil War. Before the Revolution, across some 150 years, lawyers in different colonies underwent different experiences at different times. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, more lawyers were entering professional life. After the revolution and the defection by the Tory lawyers, the remaining quickly burnished their images in the glow of republican ideals while grasping new market opportunities. For …

Law And Economic Change During The Short Twentieth Century, John Henry Schlegel

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 16 in Cambridge History of Law in America, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century and After (1920–), Michael Grossberg & Christopher Tomlins, eds.

The brief recounting of the American economy in the twenties and thirties raises obvious questions about law and economic change. Economic change is the shift from one enacted, in both senses, understanding of economic life to another, in the case of the short twentieth century, from an associationalist economy to an impatient economy. This chapter explicates this economic change, and interrogates it in order to understand the role of law in its occurrence. Despite the …

Freedom Of Contract And Freedom Of Person: A Brief History Of “Involuntary Servitude” In American Fundamental Law, Robert J. Steinfeld

Contributions to Books

Published as Chapter 14 in Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850, Jürgen Heideking, James A. Henretta & Peter Becker, eds.

Liberal ideas are normally taken to have played an important role in the development of free markets, and of free labor based on contract in those markets. A closer look at labor regimes in the nineteenth century, however, reveals that liberal commitments to freedom did not straightforwardly produce what we today would think of as free labor. Just as often they produced a form of coerced contractual labor. And this was quite simply because liberal commitments …

Labor – Free Or Coerced? An Historical Reassessment Of Differences And Similarities, Robert J. Steinfeld, Stanley L. Engerman

Contributions to Books

Published in Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues, Tom Brass & Marcel van der Linden, eds.