Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there is an official authority to enforce them? Or do we have an unspoken sense of law and ethics?

To answer these questions, John Phillip Reid's Contested Empire explores the implicit notions of law shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Idaho and surrounding areas in the early nineteenth century. Both the United States and Great Britain had claimed this region, and passions were intense. Focusing mainly on Canadian explorer and trader Peter Skene Ogden, Reid finds that both side largely avoided violence and other difficulties because they held the same definitions of property, contract, conversion, and possession.

In 1824, the Hudson's Bay Company directed Ogden to decimate the furbearing animal population of the Snake River country, thus marking the region a "fur desert." With this mandate, Great Britain hoped to neutralize any interest American furtrappers could have in the area. Such a mandate set British and American fur men on a collision course, but Ogden and his American counterparts implicitly followed a kind of law and procedure and observed a mutual sense of property and rights even as the two sides vied for control of the fur trade.

Failing to take legal culture into consideration, some previous accounts have depicted these conflicts as mere episodes of lawless frontier violence. Reid expands our understanding of the West by considering the unspoken sense of law that existed, despite the lack of any formalized authorities, in what had otherwise been considered a "lawless" time.

John Phillip Reid is one of the most highly regarded historians of law as it was practiced on the state level in the nascent United States. He is not just the recipient of numerous honors for his scholarship but the type of historian after whom such accolades are named: the John Phillip Reid Award is given annually by the American Society for Legal History to the author of the best book by a mid-career or senior scholar. Legitimating the Law is the third installment in a trilogy of books by Reid that seek to extend our knowledge about the judicial history of the early republic by recounting the development of courts, laws, and legal theory in New Hampshire. Here Reid turns his eye toward the professionalization of law and the legitimization of legal practices in the Granite State-customs and codes of professional conduct that would form the basis of judiciaries in other states and that remain the cornerstone of our legal system to this day throughout the US. Legitimating the Law chronicles the struggle by which lawyers and torchbearers of strong, centralized government sought to bring standards of competence to New Hampshire through the professionalization of the bench and the bar-ambitions that were fought vigorously by both Jeffersonian legislators and anti-Federalists in the private sector alike, but ultimately to no avail.

Do law and legal procedures exist only so long as there is an official authority to enforce them? Or do we have an unspoken sense of law and ethics?To answer these questions, John Phillip Reid's Contested Empire explores the implicit notions of law shared by American and British fur traders in the Snake River country of Idaho and surrounding areas in the early nineteenth century. Both the United States and Great Britain had claimed this region, and passions were intense. Focusing mainly on Canadian explorer and trader Peter Skene Ogden, Reid finds that both side largely avoided violence and other difficulties because they held the same definitions of property, contract, conversion, and possession. In 1824, the Hudson's Bay Company directed Ogden to decimate the furbearing animal population of the Snake River country, thus marking the region a ""fur desert."" With this mandate, Great Britain hoped to neutralize any interest American furtrappers could have in the area. Such a mandate set British and American fur men on a collision course, but Ogden and his American counterparts implicitly followed a kind of law and procedure and observed a mutual sense of property and rights even as the two sides vied for control of the fur trade. Failing to take legal culture into consideration, some previous accounts have depicted these conflicts as mere episodes of lawless frontier violence. Reid expands our understanding of the West by considering the unspoken sense of law that existed, despite the lack of any formalized authorities, in what had otherwise been considered a ""lawless"" time.

John Phillip Reid is widely known for his groundbreaking work in American legal history. A Law of Blood, first published in the early 1970s, led the way in an additional newly emerging academic field: American Indian history. As the field has flourished, this book has remained an authoritative text. Indeed, Gordon Morris Bakken writes in the foreword to this edition that Reid's original study "shaped scholarship and inquiry for decades." Forging the research methods that fellow historians would soon adopt, Reid carefully examines the organization and rules of Cherokee clans and towns. Investigating the role of women in Cherokee society, for example, he found that married Cherokee women had more legal authority than their counterparts in Anglo-American society. In particular, Reid explores the Cherokees' revolutionary attitudes toward government and the unique relationship between the members of the tribe and their law. Before the first European contact, the Cherokee Nation had already developed a functioning government, and by the early nineteenth century, the first Cherokee constitution had been enacted.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, English and American lawyers appealed to "the ancient constitution" as the cornerstone of liberty. According to this idea, constitutional law was not dictated by a monarch but based on the authority of custom, passed down unaltered from time immemorial. Legal historian John Phillip Reid convincingly demonstrates that this concept of an unchanging, ancient constitution furnished English common lawyers and parliamentarians an argument with which to combat royal prerogative power. At the same time, it provided American revolutionaries with legal arguments for rejecting the British parliament's effort to impose arbitrary rule upon the colonies. Whereas modern historians have tended to fault the constitutionalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for inventing a mystical past, these polemical pamphleteers had less interest in the accuracy of their history than in its usefulness in forensic argumentation. Much as lawyers contending before the bar, they appealed to the past as precedent, as analogy, as principle—in short, as forensic history. Claiming that liberty had been more effective and secure during ancient times, they upheld an idealized Anglo-Saxon standard for testing contemporary institutions. More significantly, they called upon the authority of the ancient constitution as a defense against the innovations of the English monarchy and against the assertions of an unrepresentative parliament. The Ancient Constitution and the Origins of Anglo-American Liberty complements Reid's recent book on another cornerstone of Anglo-American jurisprudence and constitutional theory, Rule of Law. Whereas "rule of law" insists that one law applies to rulers and ruled alike, the ancient constitution embodied the ideal for what that one law should be.

In today's courtroom, the jurors evaluate the evidence and pronounce the verdict while the judge has final authority in interpreting the law-but it was not always so. In colonial America, the jurors enjoyed a much greater say. Legal historian John Phillip Reid recounts how the judges gained their modern authority in the early nineteenth century by instituting courtroom practices modeled on the English "common law" judicial system. Reid brings this transformation, which in the days of the Early Republic spread throughout the states and even to the federal courts, down to human scale by focusing on the legal and judicial career of one man: Jeremiah Smith. First as a U.S. District Attorney, later as the Chief Justice of the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Smith promoted a series of reforms between 1797 and 1816. Intent upon placing the law in the hands of professional lawyers, he standardized legal procedures. While Smith made the judge lord of the courtroom at the expense of the jurors, he simultaneously mandated the publication of judicial reports that, by setting a series of precedents, served both to enhance the authority of one reading of the law and to impose limits on subsequent interpretations. As judicial decisions became more uniform, Smith believed, the law itself would become more certain. Not everyone supported these reforms, however. Jeffersonians claimed that such measures threatened to take power from the layman and feared that judges would replace democratically elected legislators as the real lawmakers. Smith himself proved eager to flex judicial muscle and soon found himself wrestling the state's governor, William Plumer. Smith's questionable rulings prolonged a trial involving Plumer's brother; and in 1805, when Plumer failed to honor a summons, Smith ordered his arrest. Plumer eventually exacted his revenge and removed Smith from the chief justice's bench. This conflict between two former friends adds a human dimension to legal history. Thanks largely to the reforms introduced by Jeremiah Smith in New Hampshire, by 1830, legal theory, legal practice, and the law itself were much more uniform throughout the United States than they had been just twenty-five years before. If the reformers had not, as Reid argues, intended to favor any particular class, they did prepare the way for the development of a reliable legal system able to serve merchants and capitalists in the Industrial Age.

Republishes articles by two senior legal historians. Besides summarizing what has now become classical literature in the field, it offers illuminating insight into what it means to be a professional legal historian.

In the first decades of the nineteeth century, legal reformers in the United States strove to standardize courtroom procedures and expand judges' power at the expense of jurors while simultaneously imposing uniformity upon judicial decision making. Reid's previous book, Controlling the Law, offered a case study of this process, focusing on New Hampshire Chief Justice Jeremiah Smith and Governor William Plumer. Now in Legislating the Courts, Reid returns to the careers of Smith and Plumer to continue the story of judicial authority in the early republic. American constitutional historians and lawyers generally assume that the current doctrine of judicial supremacy not only has always been the rule of constitutional law but was the original intent of the framers of both the federal and state constitutions. This study disproves the validity of that assumption for state constitutionalism by concentrating on the law of New Hampshire-representative of the law in other jurisdictions-between the years 1789 and 1818. Legislating the Courts does not argue that judicial independence was not the desired rule among the framers of the constitutions; instead, by looking at both practice and constitutional theory, this study shows that the reality for the early republic was both judicial dependence and legislative supremacy. To illustrate his points, Reid refers to three government practices that together with other matters altered judicial salaries-mandated by the constitution to be "permanent" and "honorable"-and that created a dependent judicial system. The first practice, "restoring litigants to their law," gave litigants who had lost a jury trial and had judgments pronounced against them the option to petition the legislature to be relieved from the judgment and to be granted a new jury trial. In the second practice the legislature acted on the premise that it had the authority to investigate the conduct of judges and require them to explain why they behaved in certain ways. Finally, in the third practice, the legislature exercised the authority to remove judges from their tenure at "good behavior" by "legislating" them out of office and then appointing a new bench. Despite an attempt to subordinate the judiciary to the will of the citizenry, as represented by the state legislature, Reid finds that judges managed to maintain their autonomy, subject only to the dictates of the law.

Alexander Ross, the pioneer recorder of the early fur trade in the far northern West, led a beaver trapping expedition in 1824 into the vast, unfamiliar territory east of trading posts in the Pacific Northwest. He and his men ventured deep into Snake River country in present-day Idaho and Montana. In this narrative, based on the accounts left by Ross and others, historian and legal scholar John Phillip Reid describes the experiences of the earliest Hudson's Bay Company fur-trapping expeditions--ventures usually overlooked by historians--and explores the interaction between the diverse cultures of the Pacific Northwest.

Ross recorded in exquisite detail the endless vexations of managing a brigade drawn from the widest possible mixtures of ethnic backgrounds and nationalities--his men included metis (or mixed-bloods), Americans, Canadians, and Native "freemen" (independent contractors) from over a dozen Indian nations. Ross's accounts reveal the consequences of running low on supplies and having to butcher the animals, and how hunting game for sport threatened the stock of ammunition and the condition of the horses. Entire expeditions were at the mercy of the most careless trapper and the weakest horse. Hiring guides was chancy, for local tribesmen did not always know the locations of beaver streams, or even the terrain ahead. Religion could be problematic, as well; both French Canadians "and" Iroquois refused to work on Catholic holy days.

More than merely chronicling Ross's accounts, Reid uses early trapping expeditions as a lens for examining legal, institutional, and commercial behavior among the diverse population the fur trade drew together. In addition, he assesses broader issues such as cultural conflict between Ross and his men, and the Hudson's Bay Company's drive to discourage American settlement in the Northwest by exterminating the beaver there. Those interested in the history of the early Northwest will find this well-crafted saga both engaging and enlightening.

"Rule of law"-the idea that the law is the nation's sovereign authority-has served as a cornerstone for constitutional theory and the jurisprudence of liberty. When law reigns over governors and the governed alike, a citizen need not fear capricious monarchs, arbitrary judges, or calculating bureaucrats. When a citizen obeys the law, life, liberty, and property are safe; when a citizen disobeys, the law alone will determine the appropriate punishment. While the rule of law's English roots can be found in the Middle Ages, its governing doctrine rose to power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Phillip Reid traces the concept's progress through a series of landmark events in Great Britain and North America: the trial of Charles I, the creation of the Mayflower Compact, the demand for a codification of the laws in John Winthrop's Massachusetts Bay Colony, and an attempt to harness the Puritan Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell to the rule of law by crowning him king. The American Revolution, the culmination of two centuries of political foment, marked the greatest victory for rule of law. Even as Reid tells this triumphal story, he argues that we must not take for granted what the expression "rule of law" meant. Rather, if we are to understand its nuances, we must closely examine the historical context as well as the intentions of those who invoked it as a doctrine. He makes a convincing case; along the way, he employs generous quotations from key documents to fortify his sometimes startling insights. This combination of solid scholarship and intellectual agility is nothing less than what readers have come to expect from this eminent legal historian.

Americans did not rebel from Great Britain because they wanted a different government. They rebelled because they believed that Parliament was violating constitutional precepts. Colonial Whigs did not fight for American rights. They fought for English rights.--from the Preface
John Phillip Reid goes on to argue that it was generally the application, not the definition, of these rights that was disputed. The sole--and critical--exception concerned the right of representation. American perceptions of the responsibility of representatives to their constituents, the necessity of equal representation, and the constitutional function of consent had diverged gradually, but significantly, from British tradition. Drawing on his mastery of eighteenth-century legal thought, Reid explores the origins and shifting meanings of representation, consent, arbitrary rule, and constitution. He demonstrates that the controversy which led to the American Revolution had more to do with jurisprudential and constitutional principles than with democracy and equality. This book will interest legal historians, Constitutional scholars, and political theorists.