Law in America: A Short History

by Lawrence M. Friedman

Book Overview

Throughout America's history, our laws have been a reflection of who we are, of what we value, of who has control. They embody our society's genetic code. In the masterful hands of the subject's greatest living historian, the story of the evolution of our laws serves to lay bare the deciding struggles over power and justice that have shaped this country from its birth pangs to the present. Law in America is a supreme example of the historian's art,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812972856
• ISBN13: 9780812972856
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

succinct

A brilliant survey of American legal history. Be advised that this edition seems to be an abridged version of two greater Lawrence Friedman works, A History of American Law and American Law in the 20th Century and if you're at all intrigued with this kind of work, or if this edition intrigues you, I do highly recommend those volumes. This particular work is the kind of book you might want to send to family members curious about why you're going/have gone to law school, particularly as Mr. Friedman's prose is clear and quite readable, and won't intimidate people who are new to the law. A good sampler indeed.

American Law in context

This pocket book by Lawrence Friedman is a beautifully crafted short history of American Law and the politics behind. It is neither a reference book nor an introduction to U.S. legal history, but a discourse (or journey) on the evolution of law in America. It is very evocative and generates a craving for more (for that there is a nice commented bibliography). Friedman finds space to comment the system ("In a common law system, the judges who write the opinions are crucial and important figures. To be more precise, the law gets made by appellate judges"), its procedures (The overwhelming majority of cases are never appealed to a higher court indeed, the overwhelming majority of controversies never get to the courts at all") and its inhabitants ("Americans, it is said, are more rights conscious than most citizens of other countries; more prone to sue for damages"). If those appears personal views, instead they are thoroughly thought, but supporting evidence should be found elsewhere. While this book is less than 200 pages, the number of issues dealt in the book is impressive, from slavery to punishment, from privacy to how insurance companies and other businesses have waged a campaign against excessive tort liability (famous fabricated horror stories: the psychic who got a million dollars for losing her psychic power; the woman who got millions for spilling hot coffee on herself ; the burglar who was hurt while burglarizing somebody's house, and sued the owners). A highly recommended book for all.

A Basic History of American Law

This book provides a very basic overview of the U.S. legal system. It is short, and a quick read without any jargon or difficult concepts.This book would be ideal for a person who is not from the US, but who wants to know about how our justice system works and why it works that way. Much of it is a bit too basic for most US citizens who had Civics in high school and who watches Law and Order obsessively. I did learn a few things, though, so anyone who is interested in the US legal system (which, as anyone who watches Law and Order knows, can sometimes be quite complicated) might want to take a look if they want some of the more obscure rules and customs explained.

fascinating and informative

Supposing that this book would be another one of those banal Law 101 type of introductory text books, I proved myself wrong by breezing through the entire book within one day. I simply couldn't put the well written book down. By well written, I meant that the author really mastered in organizing the book so it is easily followed and comprehended, and in eliminating the jargon, the unnessary legal structures, and case studies that could only confuse the readers. Upon finshing the book, I not only learned about the infrastructure of the American legal/judicial systems and their development concisely, but also was educated on the very socio-cultural environment, the one and the only american society, this system was conceived and nurtured in.

A Legal Primer for All

Lawrence Friedman has a way to start up his Introduction to American Law class at Stanford. On the morning of the first class, he buys a _San Francisco Chronicle_, and simply shows the class the paper and reads the headlines. If it is interesting enough to get in the paper, he demonstrates, the story will mention a law, a proposal for a law, something a policeman or judge has done, what the President says about a legal situation, and so on. "In the world we live in - in the country we live in - almost nothing has more impact on our lives, nothing is more entangled with our everyday existence, than that something we call the _law_." So he writes in _Law in America: A Brief History_ (Modern Library), a concise account of how law has affected American society and vice versa. That the two are deeply connected is not an original theme, but Friedman's book is a superb primer on how the law came to be the way it is in our country, and how it came to be so particularly important here. Friedman goes to the source of our law, the English _common_ law system, in which judges created laws as they decided various cases and set precedent. (Most European law systems are based on _civil_ law, whose ancestor is Roman law. A civil law system is based on codes, huge statutes that, theoretically, the judges cannot add to nor subtract from, but only interpret.) Our local laws were originally made for close knit communities in which everyone knew each other. They were interested in punishing sin as a crime. The punishments afforded included branding and whipping, which besides being painful, would mark the recipient as the community saw him; shame and stigma worked for the community better than loss of freedom. Friedman traces the effects of the Industrial Revolution, and the lack of legal recourse for factory employees harmed on the job. It was not until the twentieth century that an employee could count on compensation for a job injury. The protectionism of twentieth law has paralleled the growth in national government as opposed to local government. The economy unified (a mall in Florida looks the same as one in Alaska), and styles are national rather than local. The Rehnquist Supreme Court has shown some interest in "breathing life into the corpse of the dead doctrine of state's rights," but given the grants that the federal government enjoys overseeing and the huge body of federal regulations covering minute areas of enterprise, and given the spotlight that the president himself enjoys, it seems unlikely that the center of attention will shift back to the states.Friedman's examples and his brief explanations of important decisions are excellent. He includes capsule histories of such phenomena as slavery and the civil rights movement, as well as the increasing rights given to women, Native Americans, and homosexuals. His discussion of divorce then and now along with the philosophy concerning common law marriage is an engaging summary. His smooth