| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Markus Dirk Dubber. The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government. New York: Columbia University Press. 2005. Pp. xvi, 268. $50.00.
This is a fascinating book—provocative and demanding. Markus Dirk Dubber, a leading scholar of American criminal law, examines the intellectual origins and historical life of the police power from the perspective of its "most patriarchal" and "awesome manifestation, the law of crime and punishment" (pp. xv, xi).	1
As Dubber acknowledges, America's archipelago of criminal justice institutions are not the full extent of the police power's domain. The special province of state and local authority (according to orthodox readings of the Tenth Amendment), the police power has for two centuries been defined by American courts as the sovereign power to govern persons and property ("men and things") in the interest of the people's welfare. As the Supreme Court noted in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), this power is "incapable of any very exact definition or limitation," for upon it depends "the security of the social order, the life and health of the citizen, the comfort of an existence in a thickly populated community, the enjoyment of private and social life, and the beneficial use of property" (p. xi). That decision upheld a Louisiana law that imposed health regulations on the butcher trade of New Orleans. By the same authority, state and local governments have leveled brothels and gambling dens, policed the behavior of slaves and their masters, and rounded up vagrants and prostitutes.	. . .

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