| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Howard Schweber. The Creation of American Common Law, 1850–1880: Technology, Politics, and the Construction of Citizenship. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp. viii, 296. $60.00.

Howard Schweber holds advanced degrees in law, history, and political science, all of them put to good use in this insightful book. As the title indicates, Schweber's central claim is a bold one. In response to the rapid growth of railroads, he argues, American courts so altered the common law in the decade before the Civil War as to give it a new and distinctively American form. Whether Schweber adequately supports this claim is likely to be a matter of contention among legal historians, some of whom may well doubt that the changes he notes in judges' common law rulings were extensive or significant enough to constitute the creation of an American common law. That some sort of significant transformation in the common law took place in this period, however, seems well established by Schweber's subtle analysis of rulings in eight states between 1850 and 1880.

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