An account of a fundamental change in American legal thought, from a conception of law as something found in nature to one in which law is entirely a human creation. Before the late 19th century, natural law played an important role in the American legal system. Lawyers routinely used it in their arguments and judges often relied upon it in their opinions. Today, by contrast, natural law plays virtually no role in the legal system. When natural law was part of a lawyer's t...

An authoritative, even-handed, and accessible history of the Supreme Court of the United States, the most powerful court in the world and the final arbiter of the world's oldest constitution. Will abortion be legal? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? May colleges prefer black applicants over white ones? These are among the most bitterly contested issues in the United States today. We answer these questions, and many more, by presenting them to nine lawyers-...

The death penalty arouses our passions as does few other issues. Some view taking another person’s life as just and reasonable punishment while others see it as an inhumane and barbaric act. But the intensity of feeling that capital punishment provokes often obscures its long and varied history in this country.Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive history of the death penalty in the United States. Law professor Stuart Banner tells the story of how, over four centuries, d...

Between the early seventeenth century and the early twentieth,nearly all the land in the United States was transferred from AmericanIndians to whites. This dramatic transformation has been understood in two very different ways--as a series of consensual transactions, but also as a process of violent conquest. Both views cannot be correct. How did Indians actually lose their land?Stuart Banner provides the first comprehensive answer. He argues that neither simple coercion nor simple...

What is the difference between gambling and speculation? This difficult question has posed a legal problem throughout American history. Many have argued that periodic failures by regulators to differentiate between the two have been the proximate causes of catastrophic economic downturns, including the Great Depression and the 2008 global financial crisis. In Speculation, Stuart Banner provides a sweeping history of how the fine lines separating investment, speculation, and outrig...

The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority of Americans have only the vaguest sense of what antitrust law is, most know one thing about it-that baseball is exempt. In The Baseball Trust, legal historian Stuart Banner illuminates the series of court rulings that resulted in one of the most curious features of our legal system-ba...

What is the difference between gambling and speculation? This difficult question has posed a legal problem throughout American history. Many have argued that periodic failures by regulators to differentiate between the two have been the proximate causes of catastrophic economic downturns, including the Great Depression and the 2008 global financial crisis. In Speculation, Stuart Banner provides a sweeping history of how the fine lines separating investment, speculation, and outrig...

Will abortion be legal? Should people of the same sex be allowed to marry? May colleges prefer black applicants over white ones? These are among the most bitterly contested issues in the United States today. We answer these questions, and many more, by presenting them to nine lawyers—the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. No other nation commits so many important questions to its highest court.Stuart Banner’s The Most Powerful Court in the World is an authoritative...

This book is very timely for one of the most frequently debated issues in America: the separation of church and state. Where did this phrase originate? Was it always meant to prohibit expressions of religious faith in public settings as many claim today? Learn the answers to these questions and discover the Founding Fathers own words and intents in this book! With all these resources, you will be able to clearly understand the original intent of the Founding Fathers and be able to share th...

The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States. Revolutionary Backlash argues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution un...

This history of early American political thought examines the emergence, evolution, and manipulation of public opinion.In the early American republic, the concept of public opinion was a recent—and ambiguous—invention. While appearing to promise a new style of democratic politics, the concept was also invoked to limit self-rule, cement traditional prejudices, stall deliberation, and marginalize dissent. As Americans contested the meaning of this essentially contest...

With this book, Nancy Isenberg illuminates the origins of the women’s rights movement. Rather than herald the singular achievements of the 1848 Seneca Falls convention, she examines the confluence of events and ideas — before and after 1848 — that, in her view, marked the real birth of feminism. Drawing on a wide range of sources, she demonstrates that women’s rights activists of the antebellum era crafted a coherent feminist critique of church, state, and family. In addition, Isenberg sho...