The Elusive Transformation

Morton Horwitz's new book is the sequel to his 1977 Bancroft Prize-winning The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860. But as his Preface observes, "it is a very different book."' Transformation I tells a story in the populist spirit of Charles Beard. It shows how ante-bellum judges and elite lawyers fashioned an "instrumental" view of law that recruited traditional common law doctrines of property, contract, tort and commercial law to the service of promoting commercial development. By such means the legal elites helped business interests to accumulate wealth, property and power at the expense of workers, farmers, and consumers. Transformation I ends with the legal establishment beginning to construct a novel orthodoxy,