| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830. By Daniel J. Hulsebosch. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. 494 pp. $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2955-2.)

This ambitious, densely packed, and challenging book is intelligent and informative as well as speculative and problematical. A New York University professor of law, Daniel J. Hulsebosch has a strong command of legal history but is less expert about major episodes in American political and constitutional history. His book argues a theme of New York's constitutional transformation within a context of empire-building from colonial beginnings to the early nineteenth century. He tells a story of New York provincials before the Revolution selectively drawing on a diverse inheritance of British legal and constitutional sources to defend jury trial, legislative assemblies, and independent judges against imperial centralizing efforts. Accelerated by the run-up to the Revolution, New York's constitutionalism took a long stride in the hothouse settings of state and federal constitution-making, legal cases such as Rutgers v. Waddington (1784), and Federalist/Antifederalist debates. Finally, in the postwar decades New York's (and the nation's) constitutionalism was shaped by jurists, lawyers, and commentators into a "new genre of American constitutional law" characterized by a coherence, explicitness, and restrictiveness that contrasted sharply with its amorphous, plastic, and variegated English sources (p. 13).

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