The Accidental Republic
The Accidental Republic

Author: John Fabian Witt

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-07-01

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0674045270

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In the five decades after the Civil War, the United States witnessed a profusion of legal institutions designed to cope with the nation’s exceptionally acute industrial accident crisis. Jurists elaborated the common law of torts. Workingmen’s organizations founded a widespread system of cooperative insurance. Leading employers instituted welfare-capitalist accident relief funds. And social reformers advocated compulsory insurance such as workmen’s compensation. John Fabian Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the twentieth century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped twentieth- and twenty-first-century American accident law; they laid the foundations of the American administrative state; and they occasioned a still hotly contested legal transformation from the principles of free labor to the categories of insurance and risk. In this eclectic moment at the beginnings of the modern state, Witt describes American accident law as a contingent set of institutions that might plausibly have developed along a number of historical paths. In turn, he suggests, the making of American accident law is the story of the equally contingent remaking of our accidental republic.

Reports
Reports

Author: New York State Bar Association

Publisher:

Published: 1908

Total Pages: 782

ISBN-13:

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Vols. contain reports of the association and proceedings of the annual meetings, occasional special meetings; and midsummer meetings for 1933-41.

Two Forms of Conservatism
Two Forms of Conservatism

Author: William E. Nelson

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2024-06-26

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 0700636641

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The period between 1860 and 1920—inclusive of the Gilded Age and much of the Lochner era in legal history—is typically regarded as the heyday of conservative jurisprudence. According to this received wisdom, conservative judges and much of the legal profession were on the side of big business and the rich. Judges in this period subscribed to “classical” legal thought, and it was only when this was supplanted by “progressive” legal thought that courts reached decisions critical of business. Renowned legal historian William E. Nelson seeks to correct this narrative by examining in close detail the work of judges in the single jurisdiction of New York as well as the rulings of US Supreme Court justices. What he finds is another type of conservatism besides the one that favors the rich. Instead, the judges in this period often reached decisions that were critical of business. Many of their accomplishments were forward-looking and progressive in character but conservative for another reason: they rigidly followed precedent, with only occasional exceptions. While some legal realists see the emphasis on precedent as a veneer to hide the judges’ policy preferences, Nelson shows that this explanation does not fit the evidence. The judges had no consistent policy preferences, and their decisions favored a wide array of policies. Two Forms of Conservatism is the work of an expert historian with an eye for detail and a deep understanding of legal thought. He shows that these New York judges, who were quite conservative regarding the law, nevertheless laid the foundation for the liberalism of later political leaders.

Petroleum and Public Safety
Petroleum and Public Safety

Author: James B. McSwain

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2018-07-06

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0807169145

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Throughout the twentieth century, cities such as Houston, Galveston, New Orleans, and Mobile grappled with the safety hazards created by oil and gas industries as well as the role municipal governments should play in protecting the public from these threats. James B. McSwain’s Petroleum and Public Safety reveals how officials in these cities created standards based on technical, scientific, and engineering knowledge to devise politically workable ordinances related to the storage and handling of fuel. Each of the cities studied in this volume struggled through protracted debates regarding the regulation of crude petroleum and fuel oil, sparked by the famous Spindletop strike of 1901 and the regional oil boom in the decades that followed. Municipal governments sought to ensure the safety of their citizens while still reaping lucrative economic benefits from local petroleum industry activities. Drawing on historical antecedents such as fire-protection engineering, the cities of the Gulf South came to adopt voluntary, consensual fire codes issued by insurance associations and standards organizations such as the National Board of Fire Underwriters, the National Fire Protection Association, and the Southern Standard Building Code Conference. The culmination of such efforts was the creation of the International Fire Code, an overarching fire-protection guide that is widely used in the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America. In devising ordinances, Gulf South officials pursued the politics of risk management, as they hammered out strategies to eliminate or mitigate the dangers associated with petroleum industries and to reduce the possible consequences of catastrophic oil explosions and fires. Using an array of original sources, including newspapers, municipal records, fire-insurance documents, and risk-management literature, McSwain demonstrates that Gulf South cities played a vital role in twentieth-century modernization.