During 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 this book, Horwitz s students re-examine legal history from America s colonial era to the late twentieth century. They ask classic Horwitzian questions, of how legal doctrine, thought, and practice are shaped by the interests of the powerful, as well as by the ideas of lawyers, politicians, and others. The essays address current questions in legal history, from colonial legal practice to questions of empire, civil rights, and constitutionalism in a democracy. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.

In his paradigm-shifting analysis, Daniel J. Hulsebosch captures the essential paradox at the heart of American constitutional history: the Revolution, which brought political independence and substituted the people for the British crown as the source of legitimate authority, also led to the establishment of newly powerful constitutions and a new postcolonial genre of constitutional law that would have been the envy of the British imperial agents who had struggled to govern the colonies before the Revolution.The revolutionary transformation did not, therefore, consist of a new conception of the constitution as a set of restrictions on the power of the state, Hulsebosch argues. Instead, it entailed a search for new ways of framing, empowering, and limiting official power. Hulsebosch demonstrates that these constitutional experiments were informed by imperial experience and continued well into the nineteenth century, as New York moved from the periphery of the British Atlantic empire to the center of a new continental empire.