Law's Imagined Republic
Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America

Law's Imagined Republic shows how the American Revolution was marked by the rapid proliferation of law talk across the colonies.

Steven Wilf (Author)

9780521145282, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 12 April 2010

254 pages
22.6 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.35 kg

'Steven Wilf's Law's Imagined Republic is a highly provocative, inventive, and fascinating analysis of the importance of the popular discourse and practice of law-making and law-interpreting during the American Revolution. His account of the centrality of popular contributions to the culture of the law in America is thoughtful and compelling, and his efforts to bridge law and literature fresh and enjoyable.' Michael Meranze, University of California, Los Angeles

Law's Imagined Republic shows how the American Revolution was marked by the rapid proliferation of law talk across the colonies. This legal language was both elite and popular, spanned different forms of expression from words to rituals, and included simultaneously real and imagined law. Since it was employed to mobilize resistance against England, the proliferation of revolutionary legal language became intimately intertwined with politics. Drawing on a wealth of material from criminal cases, Steven Wilf reconstructs the intertextual ways Americans from the 1760s through the 1790s read law: reading one case against another and often self-consciously comparing transatlantic legal systems as they thought about how they might construct their own legal system in a new republic. What transformed extraordinary tales of crime into a political forum? How did different ways of reading or speaking about law shape our legal origins? And, ultimately, how might excavating innovative approaches to law in this formative period, which were constructed in the street as well as in the courtroom, alter our usual understanding of contemporary American legal institutions? Law's Imagined Republic tells the story of the untidy beginnings of American law.

Introduction
1. Criminal law out-of-doors
2. 'The language of law is a vulgar tongue'
3. Local justice, transatlantic justice
4. The problem of punishment in an age of revolution
5. The statute imagined
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], History of the Americas [HBJK]