Expansion, Transformation, and the Release of Energy

The newly independent empire of the United States in its explosive, expansionist phase was organized by law built around what Willard Hurst called "the release of energy principle." In this section of the course we consider that regime and its effects.

Readings

Assigned

From the Notebooks of Judge Thomas Rodney of the Mississippi Territory

Suggested

Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Wisconsin Press 1956)

Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Harvard 1977):

• Chapter 1 [pdf] | [djvu*]
• Chapter 2 [pdf] | [djvu*]
• Chapter 3 [pdf] | [djvu*]

* Djvu is a wonderful format for compressed document images. For example, these documents are an order of magnitude smaller than the original pdfs. If you're having trouble with the djvu files, check out the djvu libre project for a free software reader that will work on your operating system, or use firefox, which has support for the format built-in.

Notes and Materials

Projects