Reviewed by Christopher Lawrence Tomlins | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Christopher Lawrence Tomlins | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Christopher Lawrence Tomlins, The American Bar Foundation, Chicago

From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture and Ritual in American Law, 1658–1860. By Martha J. McNamara. Creating the North American Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 182 pages. $39.95 (cloth). The Courthouses of Early Virginia: An Architectural History. By Carl R. Lounsbury. Colonial Williamsburg Studies in Chesapeake History and Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. 448 pages. $65.00 (cloth).
During the last three decades, legal-historical research has become an extraordinarily vigorous, empirically rich, and conceptually adventurous realm of scholarship. Early American legal history, largely overlooked in the grand historical metanarratives of American law propounded by writers such as Roscoe Pound, Willard Hurst, and even Perry Miller, has emerged as a key component area of legal history's revival through the pathbreaking work of scholars including David Thomas Konig, Bruce H. Mann, Mary Sarah Bilder, and Holly Brewer.¹ Such is the cumulative strength of this base literature in early American legal history that it can well support new genres of scholarship that are less sociolegal or legal-intellectual in orientation than broadly cultural: scholarship that seeks to locate with precision the place of legal practices and legal phenomena in the webs of institutional power and cultural authority that created and sustained settler societies in the English colonies.	1
Law quite decidedly had its place, or places, in early America: courthouses in which and by which its authority was materially manifested in civil, criminal, and administrative proceedings; public spaces through which law's ritualized processions moved to claim them for its rule; private spaces, for example, the dwellings of magistrates where supplicants might be required to go to initiate or answer to low-level legal proceedings (and be reminded thereby how the ostensibly public processes of law were woven into the real geography of local power); and places of punishment, where abused, lacerated, dismembered, rotting bodies eloquently signified that law had its own terrible swift sword.	2
Martha J. McNamara and Carl R. Lounsbury engage with early American law's material culture by focusing on those places. Each begins with the courthouse, or more accurately with the variety of little rooms—in taverns, private houses, meetinghouses, as well as courthouses—in which law first called men to order. Each traces and explains the increasing attention given to the specialization of design of the exterior and interior space of the courthouse during roughly similar periods, from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Each documents the transformation of law's place from relatively undifferentiated general-purpose quarters to elaborate juridical-penal complexes where, by the early nineteenth century, the physical proximity of specialized court and specialized prison created, in McNamara's words, a "landscape of justice" (3) that testified to law's assumption of majesty and to the consequences of contravention.	3
Read together the two books are nicely complementary. Each is grounded in a different colonial culture: Massachusetts in McNamara's case and Virginia (with a few traces of Maryland and North Carolina) in Lounsbury's. Without in any sense targeting each other's work—the books were published in too close succession to have informed each other, though McNamara does cite earlier work by Lounsbury—each fills empirical gaps left by the other, or raises in the reader's mind questions about the other's interpretive perspective. Purposively illustrated, each leaves far behind the coffeetable stage of lavishly antiquarian treatments of past built environments. Following in the footsteps of Katherine Fischer Taylor's impressive analysis of the representation of French criminal justice in In The Theater of Criminal Justice (though with perhaps less of her eye for the detail of legal dramaturgy), they confidently and sure-handedly establish a point of departure for the history of American law's material culture.²	. . .

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