Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Studies in Legal History)

Amazon.com Price: $1.00 (as of 06/05/2019 08:50 PST- Details)

SKU: 0816-WS1201-A03016-0807817562 Categories: , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighborly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbors and strangers alike.

During the colonial period population growth, immigration, economic development, war, and non secular revival transformed the nature and context of official and economic relations in Connecticut. Towns lost the insularity and homogeneity that made them the embodiment of community. Debt litigation used to be transformed from a communal model of disputing by which procedures were in keeping with the individual disagreements to a system of mechanical rules that homogenized law. Pleading grew more technical, and the civil jury faded from predominance to comparative insignificance. Arbitration and church disciplinary proceedings, the standard alternatives to legal process, became more formal and legalistic and, in the end, less communal.

Using a pc-assisted analysis of court records and insights drawn from anthropology and sociology, Mann concludes that changes in the law and its applications were tied to the growing commercialization of the economy. They also will also be attributed to the fledgling legal profession’s approach to law as an autonomous system moderately than as a communal process. These changes marked the advent of a legal system that valued predictability and uniformity of legal relations more than responsiveness to individual communities. Mann shows that by the eve of the Revolution colonial law had transform less identified with community and more closely associated with society.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Colonial Period » Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut (Studies in Legal History)

Recent Products