American Legal History

A Very Short Introduction

By: G. Edward White

Narrated by: Jason Huggins

Law has played a central role in American history. From colonial times to the present, law has not just reflected the changing society in which legal decisions have been made - it has played a powerful role in shaping that society, though not always in positive ways.

Eminent legal scholar G. Edward White offers a compact overview that sheds light on the impact of law on a number of key social issues. The book traces important threads woven throughout our nation's past, looking at how law shaped Native-American affairs, slavery, business, and home life, as well as how it has dealt with criminal and civil offenses. Likewise, law initially legitimated slavery in the United States, and legal institutions, including the Supreme Court, failed to resolve the tensions stirred up by the westward expansion of slavery, eventually sparking the Civil War. White also looks at the expansion of laws regarding property rights, which were vitally important to the colonists, many of whom left Europe hoping to become land owners; the evolution of criminal punishment from a public display (the stocks, the gallows) to a private prison system; the rise of tort law after the Civil War; and the progress in legal education, moving from informal apprenticeships and lax standards to modern law schools and rigorous bar exams.

©2014 Oxford University Press (P)2021 Tantor

A strikingly bad book

I'm a big fan of the Very Short Introduction series in general, but they are by many different authors and of uneven quality. It would be easy enough, and not untrue, to dismiss this as "woke". White starts out American legal history with land disputes with Native American tribes then dives right into the next topic, slavery. Both these topics clearly touch involve law, and may well deserve significant coverage in a survey of American legal history, but presented as the first two chapters, they lend no structure to the inquiry (nor does White develop one later). It's hard to escape the impression that White feels he's accomplishing some moral victory by including these subjects in his aimless and superficial book. But when Whire gets to an extended discussion of how radio spectrum was allocated in the postwar period, surely the most thoroughly explored topic in the book, you realize the fault is not some misguided leftwing ideological blindness but something far deeper.