Lisa Cowan: Review of Johnston’s Roman Law in Context (2nd Edition)
Some 23 years after the first edition of Roman Law in Context, David Johnston makes his case for the second by pointing to the considerable advances in the study of Roman social and economic history in the interim. Considering the significant new epigraphic material and scholarship which has emerged over recent decades, the point is well...
Bruce W. Dearstyne: Revisiting the “Brandeis Brief”
The “Brandeis Brief” was the first brief in U.S. legal history to present detailed information about actual working conditions rather than just legal and constitutional references. Attorney Louis D. Brandeis, labor reform advocate and later Supreme Court Associate Justice, prepared and submitted the brief in the 1908 U.S. Supreme Court case of Muller v. Oregon. That case tested...
Hendrik Hartog recently published “Four Fragments,” an attempt to address an old question—“What does it mean to know law as . . . existing in historical time?”[1] Surely, any answer given to this question is also given in an historical context, in a present of which there are many possible, only possibly linear, pasts. Which...
Five years ago, in commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of William Novak’s first book, The People’s Welfare (1996), I remarked on the thousands of dissertations the book undoubtedly launched—my own included.[1] I found particularly generative the book’s conclusion, in which Novak moved beyond the older paradigm of governance that was the focus of The People’s...
Sophia Z. Lee: Evolution or Revolution in Novak’s “New Democracy”
Original grain elevator (right, 1891) and concrete grain elevator, 1914. City Mills Company, Eighteenth Street & First Avenue, Columbus, Muscogee County, GA. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. [Editor's Note: The following is adapted from remarks presented at the 2022 American Political History Conference; a version also appears in the Yale Journal on Regulation’s...
Joanna Grisinger–Novak’s A New Democracy: By and For Whom?
In Fall 1998, I enrolled in Bill Novak’s graduate seminar, and thus from the first moment of my graduate training in history I was encouraged to start thinking about the ideas about state capacity and state power so elegantly developed in New Democracy.[1] Bill encouraged us to flip through the pages of the Encyclopedia of...
Ajay K. Mehrotra: Continuity and Change from Novak’s People’s Welfare to New Democracy
In 1994, William J. Novak published, The People’s Welfare: Law & Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. The book was quickly hailed as a brilliant account of the many ways that American lawmakers—from common law judges to local legislators—regulated antebellum American economy and society. With his panoramic view of the myriad types of nineteenth-century government activity, Novak...