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James Coolidge Carter And Mugwump Jurisprudence, Lewis Grossman
James Coolidge Carter And Mugwump Jurisprudence, Lewis Grossman
Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals
This article examines the thought of James Coolidge Carter, a leading legal theorist, practicing attorney, and political reformer of the Gilded Age, most famous for his resistance to codification. Carter, like many elite legal figures in the late nineteenth century, belonged to the genteel urban political culture known as the Mugwumps. I show how Carter's suspicion of legislators, his faith in courts, his equation of the common law with custom, and his condemnation of legislation inconsistent with custom, reflected his Mugwump world view. I also explore how Carter, like other Mugwumps, struggled to accommodate traditional modes of thought to the …