For four decades, John Phillip Reid has been one of the most productive and challenging practitioners of American legal and constitutional history. Writing on subjects as diverse as the law of the Cherokee, legal culture on the Overland trail, and the legal and constitutional history of the American Revolution, Reid has illuminated the many ways in which law has been a central cultural value. Law as Culture and Culture as Law not only honors Professor Reid's decades of scholarship and teaching it presents a spectrum of historical inquiries developing and engaging Reid's insights and methodological approaches to legal and constitutional history. The essays gathered in this volume span nearly three centuries and two continents, ranging from the agonizing struggles over law, religion, and governance in late seventeenth-century Ireland to the legal and constitutional regimes of governmental regulation in twentieth-century New York. Law as Culture and Culture as Law is a tribute to John Philip Reid and the best evidence of his profound influence on the study and writing of legal history.

We all hope that we will be cared for as we age. But the details of that care, for caretaker and recipient alike, raise some of life s most vexing questions. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as an explosive economy and shifting social opportunities drew the young away from home, the elderly used promises of inheritance to keep children at their side. Hendrik Hartog tells the riveting, heartbreaking stories of how families fought over the work of care and its compensation.

"Someday All This Will Be Yours" narrates the legal and emotional strategies mobilized by older people, and explores the ambivalences of family members as they struggled with expectations of love and duty. Court cases offer an extraordinary glimpse of the mundane, painful, and intimate predicaments of family life. They reveal what it meant to be old without the pensions, Social Security, and nursing homes that now do much of the work of serving the elderly. From demented grandparents to fickle fathers, from litigious sons to grateful daughters, Hartog guides us into a world of disputed promises and broken hearts, and helps us feel the terrible tangle of love and commitments and money.

From one of the bedrocks of the human condition the tension between the infirmities of the elderly and the longings of the young emerges a pioneering work of exploration into the darker recesses of family life. Ultimately, Hartog forces us to reflect on what we owe and are owed as members of a family.

In this intriguing book, Hendrik Hartog uses a forgotten 1840 case to explore the regime of gradual emancipation that took place in New Jersey over the first half of the nineteenth century. In Minna's case, white people fought over who would pay for the costs of caring for a dependent, apparently enslaved, woman. Hartog marks how the peculiar language mobilized by the debate - about care as a "mere voluntary courtesy" - became routine in a wide range of subsequent cases about "good Samaritans". Using Minna's case as a springboard, Hartog explores the statutes, situations, and conflicts that helped produce a regime where slavery was usually but not always legal and where a supposedly enslaved person may or may not have been legally free. In exploring this liminal and unsettled legal space, Hartog sheds light on the relationships between moral and legal reasoning and a legal landscape that challenges simplistic notions of what it meant to live in freedom. What emerges is a provocative portrait of a distant legal order that, in its contradictions and moral dilemmas, bears an ironic resemblance to our own legal world.

“Best in Show” — 2014 AAM Museum Publications Design Competition Between 1950 and 1975, some of the postwar era’s most innovative artists flocked to a very unexpected place: New Jersey. Appreciating what others tended to ignore or mock, they gravitated to the state’s most desolate peripheries: its industrial wastescapes, crumbling cities, crowded highways, and banal suburbs. There they produced some of the most important work of their careers. The breakthroughs in land, conceptual, performance, and site-specific art that New Jersey helped catalyze are the subject of New Jersey as Non-Site, whose title evokes the mixed-media sculptures that Robert Smithson began to create in 1968 while driving the state’s highways with Nancy Holt. This catalogue examines more than 100 works by sixteen artists, including Amiri Baraka, George Brecht, Dan Graham, Allan Kaprow, Gordon Matta-Clark, and George Segal. Organized around three themes—ruin, cooperation, and displacement—Kelly Baum’s essay considers their work in relationship to seismic shifts in the world of art and equally dramatic changes to New Jersey’s economy, infrastructure, landscape, demography, and social stability. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum Exhibition Schedule: Princeton University Art Museum (10/05/13–01/04/14)

In nineteenth-century America, the law insisted that marriage was a permanent relationship defined by the husband's authority and the wife's dependence. Yet at the same time the law created the means to escape that relationship. How was this possible? And how did wives and husbands experience marriage within that legal regime? These are the complexities that Hendrik Hartog plumbs in a study of the powers of law and its limits.

Exploring a century and a half of marriage through stories of struggle and conflict mined from case records, Hartog shatters the myth of a golden age of stable marriage. He describes the myriad ways the law shaped and defined marital relations and spousal identities, and how individuals manipulated and reshaped the rules of the American states to fit their needs. We witness a compelling cast of characters: wives who attempted to leave abusive husbands, women who manipulated their marital status for personal advantage, accidental and intentional bigamists, men who killed their wives' lovers, couples who insisted on divorce in a legal culture that denied them that right.

As we watch and listen to these men and women, enmeshed in law and escaping from marriages, we catch reflected images both of ourselves and our parents, of our desires and our anxieties about marriage. Hartog shows how our own conflicts and confusions about marital roles and identities are rooted in the history of marriage and the legal struggles that defined and transformed it.

Over the course of his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. "The Transformation of American Law, 1780 1860" (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. "The Transformation of American Law, 1870 1960" (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country s crises. In more recent years he has written extensively on the legal realists and the Warren Court.

Following an earlier "festschrift" volume by his former students, this volume includes essays by Horwitz colleagues at Harvard and those from across the academy, as well as his students. These essays assess specific themes in Horwitz work, from the antebellum era to the Warren Court, from jurisprudence to the influence of economics on judicial doctrine. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.