The Magic Mirror: Law in American History - Softcover

Hall, Kermit L.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195044606 ISBN 13: 9780195044607

Publisher: OUP USA, 1997

Synopsis

Interest in American legal history has boomed in recent years, yet until now there have been no adequate texts for classroom use. This book fills that gap, and is a comprehensive text that considers American legal history in a social, political and economic context. It examines the workings of legal institutions, including regulatory bodies and the police, issues such as crime and punishment, deviancy and dependency, slavery, civil rights, and the changing legal status of the family and women.

About this title

Review

How to make an excellent book even better? Oxford University Press and Peter Karsten have found the prefect way. Karsten has improved upon Kermit Hall's fine American legal history textbook, The Magic Mirror (1989), by adding to the second edition mini-essays on customary and local law, new materials about alternative dispute resolution, and the latest scholarship on Native American law, immigration law, and popular resistance to law enforcement. Now fully up to day, but still as readable and teachable as ever, the second edition of The Magic Mirror will please both teachers and students. (Peter Charles Hoffer, University of Georgia)

Peter Karsten has added depth of explanation, new scholarship, and expert editorial crafting to the superb work of Kermit Hall. This new edition gives students far more understandable insights into American legal history and grounds historical interpretation in primary sources and thoughtful scholarship. (Gordon Morris Bakken, California State University, Fullerton)

Peter Karsten has judiciously revised the late Kermit Hall's Magic Mirror to incorporate the best scholarship of the past two decades and to bring the book's coverage up to date, without sacrificing the brevity or the lucidity of the original. This new edition will be welcomed by teachers of undergraduate and graduate courses, and indeed by anyone who wants to read a short survey of American legal history. (Stuart Benner, UCLA)

About the Author

The late Kermit L Hall was President of SUNY Albany.

Peter Karsten is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

Edition details

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0195044606
• ISBN 13: 9780195044607
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416