In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation's exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen's organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen's compensation.

John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

What effects do laws have? Do individuals drive more cautiously, clear ice from sidewalks more diligently, and commit fewer crimes because of the threat of legal sanctions? Do corporations pollute less, market safer products, and obey contracts to avoid suit? And given the effects of laws, which are socially best? Such questions about the influence and desirability of laws have been investigated by legal scholars and economists in a new, rigorous, and systematic manner since the 1970s. Their approach, which is called economic, is widely considered to be intellectually compelling and to have revolutionized thinking about the law.

In this book Steven Shavell provides an in-depth analysis and synthesis of the economic approach to the building blocks of our legal system, namely, property law, tort law, contract law, and criminal law. He also examines the litigation process as well as welfare economics and morality. Aimed at a broad audience, this book requires neither a legal background nor technical economics or mathematics to understand it. Because of its breadth, analytical clarity, and general accessibility, it is likely to serve as a definitive work in the economic analysis of law.

The rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth-century New Orleans was a sanitation nightmare, with the city’s slaughterhouses dumping animal remains into neighboring backwaters. When Louisiana authorized a monopoly slaughterhouse to bring about sanitation reform, many butchers felt disenfranchised. Framing their case as an infringement of rights protected by the new amendment, they flooded the lower courts with nearly 300 suits. The surviving cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court pitted the butchers’ right-to-labor against the state’s “police power” to regulate public health. The result was a controversial decision that for the first time addressed the meaning and import of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Speaking for the slim majority in the Court’s 5-4 decision, Justice Samuel F. Miller upheld the state’s actions as a fair use of its “police power.” Of much greater import, however, was Miller’s finding that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended exclusively as a means of protecting and redressing the suffering of former slaves. The result was a very restricted interpretation of the “privileges and immunities,” “due process,” and “equal protection” clauses of the new amendment. The Court refused to allow the broad terms of a single amendment to alter the existing balance of power between the states and the federal government.

In striking contrast, the minority, led by Justice Stephen Field, claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment had been intended to apply to all Americans, not just former slaves. In particular, it guaranteed the New Orleans butchers a right to equal treatment in the exercise of the police power.

Engagingly written and insightfully argued, the book provides the most complete analysis yet of this controversial Supreme Court decision, fills a major gap in American history, law, and politics, and sets the standard for all future discussions on the subject.

How does law come to be stated as substantive rules, and then how does it change? In this collection of discussions from the James S. Carpentier Lectures in legal history and criticism, one of Britain´s most acclaimed legal historians S. F. C. Milsom focuses on the development of English common law -the intellectually coherent system of substantive rules that courts bring to bear on the particular facts of individual cases -from which American law was to grow. Milsom discusses the differences between the development of land law and that of other kinds of law and, in the latter case, how procedural changes allowed substantive rules first to be stated and then to be circumvented. He examines the invisibility of early legal change and how adjustment to conditions was hidden behind such things as the changing meaning of words.

Milsom points out that legal history may be more prone than other kinds of history to serious anachronism. Nobody ever states his assumptions, and a legal writer, addressing his contemporaries, never provided a glossary to warn future historians against attributing their own meanings to his words and therefore their own assumptions to his world. Formal continuity has enabled nineteenth-century assumptions to be carried back, in some respects as far back as the twelfth century. This book brings together Milsom´s efforts to understand the uncomfortable changes that lie beneath that comforting formal surface. Those changes were too large to have been intended by anyone at the time and too slow to be perceived by historians working within the short periods now imposed by historical convention. The law was made not by great men making great decisions but by man-sized men unconcerned with the future and thinking only about their own immediate everyday difficulties. King Henry II, for example, did not intend the changes attributed to him in either land law or criminal law; the draftsman of De Donis did not mean to create the entail; nobody ever dreamed up a fiction with intent to change the law.