Böcker av David M. Gold

"The first comprehensive examination of the development of judicial elections in the American South The practice of choosing state judges by popular election is a unique aspect of American democracy. First appearing in Mississippi in 1832 and then sweeping across the United States, judicial elections had a distinctly Southern origin. Prior scholarship seeking to explain the broad acceptance of the elected judiciary mainly relied on the records of northern-state constitutional conventions. In Democracy and the Courts, David M. Gold, focusing on the nineteenth-century American South, offers the first comprehensive e exploration of the advent of this often-controversial democratic reform in the nineteenth-century American South. Making intensive use of primary sources, such as constitutional convention proceedings, legislative journals, and newspapers, in Democracy and the Courts Gold explores the various paths taken by southern states toward the elective judiciary and the reasons why some states accepted judicial elections only partially or rejected them altogether. He considers the impact of judicial elections on judicial review before the Civil War and looks to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, assessing the final and ironic triumph of the elective judiciary during the decidedly undemocratic Jim Crow era"--

Historians have paid surprisingly little attention to state-level political leaders and judges. Edward Kent (180277) was both. He served three terms as a state legislator, two as mayor of Bangor, two as governor, and two as a judge of the state supreme court. He represented Maine in the negotiations that resolved the long-running northeastern border dispute between the United States and Great Britain and served for four years as the American consul in Rio de Janeiro. The foremost Whig in Maine state politics and later a Republican judge, Kent articulated classic Whig political views and carried them forward into his Whig-Republican jurisprudence. In examining Kents career as Maines quintessential Whig, An Exemplary Whig reveals his characteristically conservative Whig outlook, including an aversion toward disorder and a deep respect for law, for existing institutions, and for the wisdom of experience. Kent brought his conservative disposition into the Republican Party. He had no use for radical abolitionism, preferring moderation and compromise to measures that endangered social order or the integrity of the Union. Kent saw the slave power, not abolitionism, as the disrupter of the Union, and he urged the ';fusion' of all antislavery elements into a new Republican party. In 1859, Maines Republican governor appointed Kent to the state supreme court. During his fourteen-year tenure, Kent adopted a Whiggish jurisprudence, pragmatic and commonsensical, and displayed a reverence for the common law and a distrust of ';theoretic speculation.' After his retirement, he chaired a constitutional revision commission, admonishing his fellow commissioners to bear in mind the ';practical wisdom' that kept dangerous innovation in check.As a politician during the Jacksonian era, Kent exemplified Whig leadership at the local and state levels. In his jurisprudence, he carried the Whig persuasion into the Republican ascendancy and the beginnings of the Gilded Age.

By tracing Appleton's life and law practice, the book addresses an aspect of early American culture that has received little attention--the nature of American individualism as embodied in the law.