Böcker av Peter Charles Hoffer

"A history of the most famous, and infamous, footnotes in leading US Supreme Court cases"--

Examining the life of an early advocate of the legal rights of Black Americans In this brisk, engaging exploration of 19th-century radical reformer and abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Peter Charles Hoffer makes the case that Phillips deserves credit as the nation's first public interest lawyer, someone who led the antebellum crusade against slavery and championed First Amendment rights and equality for all Americans, including Black people and women. As a young lawyer, bored and working at a languishing practice, Phillips nonetheless believed that the law would serve as the basis for meaningful social change, including the abolishment of slavery. While many believed the US Constitution was a virtually faultless, foundational document for governance, Phillips viewed it as deeply racist, proslavery, and, therefore, in contradiction to the Declaration of Independence. Unsurprisingly, many of Phillips's ideas were viewed as controversial and unpopular at the time, even with other abolitionists. He frequently disagreed with more conservative politicians, including Abraham Lincoln. But beyond merely criticizing the Constitution, Phillips subscribed to a "democratic positivist" belief, which contends that law is the central component of a strong democracy and that law can and should be changed by the will of the people. Thus, he believed it was critical to change public opinion on issues like slavery, which in turn would help change laws that legalized the institution. Throughout his life, he used his impressive skills as an orator to raise awareness to the horrors of enslavement, appealed to Americans' consciences, and directed them to act through voting and lawmaking. Democratic positivist approaches like his have continued to be used by lawyers to influence social reforms ranging from the civil rights movement of the 1960s to advocacy for unhoused people to abolishing America's carceral state, and Hoffer persuasively argues that Phillips's influence has been long ranging and is still recognizable in contemporary America's political landscape.

In Seward's Law, Peter Charles Hoffer argues that William H. Seward's legal practice in Auburn, New York, informed his theory of relational rights-a theory that demonstrated how the country could end slavery and establish a practical form of justice. This theory, Hoffer demonstrates, had ties to Seward's career as a country lawyer. Despite his rise to prominence, and indeed preeminence, as a US secretary of state, Seward's country-lawyer mentality endured throughout his life, as evinced in his personal attitudes and professional conduct. Relational rights, identified and termed here for the first time by Hoffer, are communal and reciprocal, what everyone owed to every other member of their community. Such rights are at the center of a jurisprudential outlook that arises directly from living in a village. Though Seward was limited by the Victorian mores and the racialist presumptions of his day, the concept of relational rights that animated him was the natural antithesis to the theories and practices of slavery. In the legal regime underpinning the institution, masters owed nothing to their bondmen and women, while those enslaved unconditionally owed life and labor to their masters. The irrepressible conflict was, for Seward, jurisprudential as well as moral and political. Hoffer's leading assumption in Seward's Law is that a lifetime spent as a lawyer influences how a person responds to everyday challenges. Seward remained a country lawyer at heart, and that fact defined the course of his political career.

Daniel Webster and the Unfinished Constitution reveals Webster as the foremost constitutional lawyer of his day. Peter Charles Hoffer builds a persuasive case that Webster was more than a skilled practitioner who rose rapidly from his hardscrabble New Hampshire origins. Hoffer thoroughly documents the ways in which Webster was an innovative jurist. While Chief Justice John Marshall gets credit for much of our early constitutional jurisprudence, in fact in a series of key cases Marshall simply borrowed Websters oral and written arguments.For Webster, Marshall, and many lawyers and jurists of their day, professions of adherence to the Constitution were universal. Yet they knew that the Constitution could not be fixed in time; its text needed to be read in light of the rapidly transforming early republic and antebellum eras or it would become irrelevant. As Chief Justice Marshall explained in Bank of the United States v. Deveaux (1809): A constitution, from its nature, deals in generals, not in detail. Its framers cannot perceive minute distinctions which arise in the progress of the nation, and therefore confine it to the establishment of broad and general principles. But were these broad and general principles themselves fixed? For Webster there were landmarks: the Contract Clause and the Commerce Clause. While others were exploring and surveying the Northwest Territory and the Louisiana Purchase, Webster set out to map the spaces in the constitutional and legal landscape that were unmarked.Peter Charles Hoffer provides an insightful and timely study of how Websters analysis of three key constitutional issues is relevant to todays constitutional conflicts: the relationship between law and politics, between public policy and private rights, and between the federal government and the states, all of which remain contentious in our constitutional jurisprudence and crucial to our constitutional order.

The Clamor of Lawyers explores a series of extended public pronouncements that British North American colonial lawyers crafted between 1761 and 1776. Most, though not all, were composed outside of the courtroom and detached from on-going litigation. While they have been studied as political theory, these writings and speeches are rarely viewed...

Law's Conscience: Equitable Constitutionalism in America

A one-volume interpretive history of the Supreme Court written for the general reader. Demonstrates how the justices have shaped the law, and how the Court has shaped our nation.

Examines the trial of journalist Thomas Cooper, which was the first major constitutional challenge to the Sedition Act of 1798 and an important showcase for debating the role of government and the place of dissent in times of national emergency.

Aaron Burr was an enigma even in his own day. Founding father and vice president, he engaged in a duel with Alexander Hamilton resulting in a murder indictment that effectively ended his legal career. This book unveils a cast of characters ensnared by politics and law at the highest levels of government.

This up-to-date history of Roe v. Wade covers the complete social and legal context of the case that remains the touchstone for America's culture wars.

Proposes a practical, workable philosophy of history for our times, one that is robust and realistic

This book charts the history of civil litigation in America from the 17th century to today, using key cases that illustrate the central theme of lawsuits in different periods of U.S. history, and enabling readers to explore and understand key questions in American life and culture through the changing nature of how and why we sue one another.

will capture the attention of everyone who cares about the study of history.

America's founders extolled a nation of laws, for they knew that only a fairly enforced legal system could protect liberty and property against corruption and tyranny. Nearly two and a half centuries later, that system remains the ultimate safeguard for us all. This title recaptures the spirit of this grand enterprise.

In late 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts, neighbours turned against neighbours and children against parents with accusations of witchcraft. This text examines what created an epidemic of accusations that resulted in the investigation of nearly 200 colonists and, for many, trial and incarceration.