| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

William E. Nelson. The Legalist Reformation: Law, Politics, and Ideology in New York, 1920–1980. (Studies in Legal History.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2001. Pp. 457. $49.95.

This splendid book was fifteen years in the making, and it sets a new and very high standard for studies of American legal history in the twentieth century. It is based on intensive work in an immense body of source material. William E. Nelson has read virtually every appellate decision reported in 620 volumes of the New York Supplement. He has read the reported federal cases (maybe 15,000 of them) filed in New York State between 1920 and 1980. And he has compiled a random sample of trial court cases from each of New York's four federal district courts (about 100 cases per year) and from four of the state's counties (another 100 cases per year). In method, scope, and significance, this book is comparable to Nelson's The Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change upon Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (1975). Here, as in his first book, Nelson distills from a mass of legal detail a synthetic account of legal change that links major upheavals in thought and politics with the pattern of development he discerns in the case law. Nelson is a lumper, not a splitter. His generalizations are big, bold, and provocative; his analysis of legal doctrine is not only accessible to nonlawyers but tackles issues that concern every historian of political economy, the family, religion and ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and race. The book merits a large audience. . . .

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