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Author Kessler, Amalia D., author.

Title Inventing American exceptionalism : the origins of American adversarial legal culture, 1800-1877 / Amalia D. Kessler
Published New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, [2017]
©2017

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 449 pages)
Series Yale Law Library series in legal history and reference
Yale Law Library series in legal history and reference.
Contents The "natural elevation" of equity : quasi-inquisitorial procedure and the early nineteenth-century resurgence of equity -- A troubled inheritance : the English procedural tradition and its lawyer-driven reconfiguration in early nineteenth-century New York -- The non-revolutionary Field Code : democratization, docket pressures, and codification -- Cultural foundations of American adversarialism : civic republicanism and the decline of equity's quasi-inquisitorial tradition -- Market freedom and adversarial adjudication : the nineteenth-century American debates over (European) conciliation courts and the problem of procedural ordering -- Freedman's Bureau exception : the triumph of due (adversarial) process and the dawn of Jim Crow -- Conclusion : The question of American exceptionalism and the lessons of history
Summary "When Americans imagine their legal system, it is the adversarial trial--dominated by dueling larger-than-life lawyers undertaking grand public performances--that first comes to mind. But as award-winning author Amalia Kessler reveals in this engrossing history, it was only in the turbulent decades before the Civil War that adversarialism became a defining American practice and ideology, displacing alternative, more judge-driven approaches to procedure. By drawing on a broad range of methods and source--and by recovering neglected influences (including from Europe)--the author shows how the emergence of the American adversarial legal culture was a product not only of developments internal to law, but also of wider socioeconomic, political, and cultural debates over whether and how to undertake market regulation and pursue racial equality. As a result, adversarialism came to play a key role in defining American legal institutions and practices, as well as national identity"--Book cover
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Adversary system (Law) -- United States -- History -- 19th century
Conduct of court proceedings -- United States -- History -- 19th century
Procedure (Law) -- United States -- History -- 19th century
HISTORY -- United States -- 19th Century.
Adversary system (Law)
Conduct of court proceedings
Procedure (Law)
United States
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2016944171
ISBN 9780300224849
0300224842
0300198078
9780300198072
0300222254
9780300222258