Description
Organized around periods of social need and turmoil, the book considers the role of states as legal laboratories in setting up American authority west of the Appalachians, in both implementing and limiting Jacksonian reforms and in navigating legal crises before and all through the Civil War―including Wisconsin’s invocation of sovereignty to defy federal fugitive slave laws. Ranney also surveys judicial revolts, the reforms of the Progressive era, and legislative responses to struggles for civil rights by immigrants, women, Native Americans, and minorities within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Because the 1960s, battles have been fought on the state level over such issues as school vouchers, voting, and abortion rights.