| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Peter Karsten. Between Law and Custom: "High" and "Low" Legal Cultures in the Lands of the British Diaspora—The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Pp. xvi, 560. $95.00.

Peter Karsten enjoys dichotomies and uses them as organizing and explanatory devices in his legal history. "Heart" contested "head" in his last book, Heart Versus Head: Judge-Made Law in Nineteenth-Century America (1997), which argued for a more religious and humanitarian bias in American legal development than conventional wisdom had allowed. Here "high" and "low" legal cultures struggle with each other in a much larger legal world. In Karsten's new book, we encounter the British diaspora, juridically divided between Karsten's United States and an agglomeration called "CANZ" (Canada, Australia, New Zealand). 1

Here is another monument to empirical research, Karsten's signature as a legal historian. Here, too, is a plain-speaking author who starts with questions and deals answers. Karsten wants to know why CANZ jurists were more closely tied to English law than his jurisprudence of the heart suggests was the case in most of the nineteenth-century United States, and whether diasporic "high" legal cultures influenced each other, particularly the United States on CANZ. He wants to understand the dynamic and fractious interaction between received "high" law and "low" customary law (popular norms) that "created what The Law actually was" (p. 14) throughout the diaspora. Finally, Karsten wants to know whether the norms of the diaspora's indigenous populations were accommodated in, or had any influence on, the processes by which those populations were displaced. . . .

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