Law's Machinery: Reforming the Craft of Lawyering in America's Industrial Age

by Kellen R. Funk

Overview

It was perhaps fitting that in an age of industrialization, Americans began to think of the law as a tool, one that could be forged to fit their needs, without regard to the traditional ways of litigating cases in court. Law's Machinery explores how innovators like New York attorney David Dudley Field, and his associates across the elite American bar, legislated a "code of practice" and attempted to rebuild the practice of law from the ground up in the mid-nineteenth century. While many of their efforts proved futile or misguided, the codifiers ultimately succeeded in turning American law into a machine run by, and in the interests of, professional lawyers like themselves. Often overlooked by histories of the world's famous code systems, the United States settled on a code of practice that elevated lawyers as the dominant force of the country's legal institutions.

Professor Funk's account ranges widely: from the Jacksonian Era to the end of the Gilded Age; from urban Gotham to the peripheries of the American West and the Reconstruction-era South; and from the parlours of Brooklyn pastors and merchants to the ornamented courthouses of Wall Street. Drawing on innovative methods in digital legal history, Law's Machinery offers a sweeping intellectual, cultural, and political telling of the modernization of American legal practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780197543931
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/07/2025
Series:	Oxford Legal History
Pages:	322
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Kellen R. Funk is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on civil procedure and American Legal History. He has authored pathbreaking works on the use of digital methods in legal history and is now at work on a history of the American bail system. He lives with his family in Princeton, New Jersey.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: The Machine
1. Sampson Against the Philistines: The Allure of an American Code
2. The Rule of Writs: Civil Justice Before the Code
3. Mere Machinery: The Political Shape of Civil Procedure
4. An Empire in Itself: The Migration of the New York Code
5. The Code American: The Institutes of Code Practice

Part II: The Garden
6. No Magic in Forms: Fact Pleading and the Forms of Action
7. The Swearer's Prayer: Oathtaking and Witness Testimony
8. The Want of Information: Discovery Before Trial
9. The Nature of Things: Law and Equity
10. How Shall the Lawyers Be Paid: Fees and Costs

Conclusion