There was an oft-repeated desire by the first generations of legal elites in the United States that the new nation must take advantage of the opportunity to remake its law into something more orderly, more coherent, and more just, not by scrapping the law as inherited but by improving it. Macias has written an intriguing and finely tuned study of some of their ideas of how to go about doing that.

Journal of the Early Republic

For decades the study of American legal history before the Civil War has been dominated by two themes—the economic effect of judicial decisions and the (largely quantitative) study of law and society. In this important book Steven Macias revives a third major theme: the intellectual history of law in the early nineteenth century. Extending themes of Perry Miller, Robert Ferguson, and Michael Hoeflich about law as a science, Macias focuses on four leading legal scientists: Gulian Verplanck, Thomas Cooper, Hugh Legaré, and Joseph Story. He reveals a range of sophisticated ideas about law, from Roman law to commercial law, to jurisprudence held by writers from Massachusetts and New York to South Carolina. Legal Science in the Early Republic recovers the intellectual world of people who saw law as a science and sought to use it to bring rationality and economic and moral progress to the United States. This book expands dramatically the territory of pre-Civil War legal history. These thinkers and their ideas need to be talked about alongside the judges whose opinions pushed economic growth and the humble people whose lives were shaped by criminal prosecutions and civil adjudications. Only now can we see how the entire world of law—from ideas to reality on the ground—fits together.

Alfred L. Brophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Professor Stephen Macias has written an important and masterful account of the development of legal science in antebellum America. His use of new sources combined with a superb critical analysis make this book a must read for anyone interested in the history of law. The book should be read by every American historian concerned with the antebellum period and should be assigned in every class concerned with the development of the legal system in the United States.

Michael H. Hoeflich, University of Kansas School of Law