• The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice

    Author(s):
    Kellen Funk, Lincoln Mullen (see profile)
    Date:
    2018
    Subject(s):
    Nineteenth century, United States, History, Law
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    capitalism, civil procedure, text analysis, text reuse, 19th century, American history, Digital history
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6HJ3F
    Abstract:
    In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level—across many codes and jurisdictions—and at a micro level—regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that Reconstruction was also a state-level legal development centered on a procedure code from the Empire State of finance capitalism.
    Notes:
    This article was published as Kellen R. Funk and Lincoln A. Mullen, "The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice," American Historical Review 123, no. 1 (2018): 132–164, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.132. Please cite the published version.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Pub. DOI:
    https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.132
    Pub. Date:
    February 2018
    Journal:
    The American Historical Review
    Volume:
    123
    Issue:
    1
    ISSN:
    0002-8762
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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