The first contemporary history of the development of American law. A survey of the nature and success of the institution of American law and its agencies and legislative bodies from roughly 1740-1940. Considered ..".a pioneering attempt to evaluate in broad terms the contributions to the development of American law made by its five chief formative agencies, the legislatures, the courts, the constitution-making process, the bar and the executive." William F. Fracher, Mo. L. Rev. 15:332-333. By the major legal historian whose writings led ..". scholars from other disciplines... to look at law with a fresh and sometimes illuminating eye." Friedman, A History of American Law 595. An important work that has been highly regarded for its social perspective, Henry Steele Commager called it ..".a pioneer work in this badly neglected field ...combine(s) scholarship, insight, and narrative and analytical skill in a striking manner."

This book frames British Romanticism as the artistic counterpart to a revolution in subjectivity occasioned by the rise of "The Rule of Law" and as a traumatic response to the challenges mounted against that ideal after the French Revolution. The bulk of this study focuses on Romantic literary replies to these events (primarily in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Blake), but its latter stages also explore how Romantic poetry's construction of the autonomous reading subject continues to influence legal and literary critical reactions to two modern crises in the rule of law: European Fascism and the continuing instability of legal interpretive strategy.

The common law action for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, but it was not until the nineteenth century that it rose to prominence and became a regular feature in law courts and gossip columns. By 1940 the action was defunct, it was inconceivable for a respectable woman to bring such a case before the courts. What accounts for this dramatic rise and fall? This book ties the story of the action's prominence and decline between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family. It argues that the idiosyncratic breach-of-promise suit and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were inextricably, and fatally, entwined. It presents the nineteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a codification of the Victorian ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods - the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian and the post-Victorian periods - and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P.G. Wodehouse, to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.