Legitimating the Law: The Struggle for Judicial Competency in Early National New Hampshire

by John Phillip Reid

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780875804514
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	06/15/2012
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

John Phillip Reid is the Russell D. Niles Professor of Law Emeritus at New York University School of Law. He is the author of numerous works, among them Controlling the Law and Legislating the Courts.

Table of Contents

1 The Arena of the Giants 3

2 An Unschooled Judge 19

3 Federalist Indian Summer 40

4 Federalist Apostate 50

5 A "Law" Governor 63

6 In Judicial Depths 81

7 Legislative Hegemony 99

8 Dependent Court, Reluctant Chief 114

9 Contesting Courts 131

10 Judicial Interregnum 151

11 Addressing Out the Judges 170

12 A Receptionist Court 179

13 Judicial Legacy 193

Notes 213

Short Titles 243

Acknowledgments 257

Index 259