Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men”: Law and Society in the Delaware Valley, 1680-1710

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Description

Of “Good Laws” and “Good Men” reveals how a Quaker minority within the Delaware Valley used the law to its own advantage yet maintained the legitimacy of its rule.
William Offutt, Jr., places legal processes on the center of this region’s social history. The brand new societies established there within the late 1600s didn’t depend on religious conformity, culture, or a simple majority to develop successfully, Offutt maintains. Somewhat, they succeeded as a result of the implementation of reforms that gave the expanding population faith within the legitimacy of legal processes introduced by a Quaker elite.
Offutt’s painstaking investigation of the records of more than 2,000 civil and 1,100 criminal cases in four county courts over a thirty-year period shows that Quakers – the “Good Men” – were disproportionately represented as justices, officers, and jurors on this system of “Good Laws” they had established, and that they fared better than did the remainder of the population in coping with it.

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