Faculty Bibliography
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The articles in this issue are drawn from the papers delivered at the conference “Ab Initio: Law in Early America,” held in Philadelphia on June 16–17, 2010—the first conference in nearly fifteen years to focus on law in early America. It was sponsored by the Penn Legal History Consortium, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the American Society for Legal History, the University of Michigan Law School, and the University of Minnesota Law School, under the direction of Sarah Barringer Gordon, Martha S. Jones, William J. Novak, Daniel K. Richter, Richard J. Ross, and Barbara Y. Welke. For two days, fifteen mostly younger scholars presented their research to a packed house, with formal comments by senior scholars and vigorous discussion with the audience. That earlier conference, “The Many Legalities of Early America,” which convened in Williamsburg in 1996, had illustrated the shift from what was once trumpeted as the “new” legal history to something that never acquired a name, perhaps because it was less self-conscious in its methodology. “Ab Initio” offered the opportunity to ask how the field has changed in the years since.
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This volume covers American law in the nineteenth century and describes the development of modern legal systems.
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Bruce H. Mann, Failure in the Land of the Free, 77 Am. Bankr. L.J. no. 1, Winter 2003, at 1.
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Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighborly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbors and strangers alike.
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Bruce H. Mann, The Formalization of Informal Law: Arbitration before the American Revolution, 59 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 443 (1984).
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The paper examines certain legal changes in eighteenth-century Connecticut, primarily in the area of debt litigation, and links them with economic development and with changes in the nature and meaning of community. The legal changes proceeded in the direction of greater rationality as expanding economic activity disrupted the multiplex ties that had once characterized communities and paired people instead in single-interest relationships. Max Weber's concept of rationality provides a theoretical base for the historical study of legal change.