| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Michael Willrich. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xxxix, 332. Cloth $70.00, paper $25.00.
In his introduction to a forum on the Constitution in American life, Harry Scheiber lamented the cleavages between legal and constitutional history even as he applauded the latter's renaissance (Journal of American History 74 [Dec 1977]: 667, 669). Twenty-five years later, those cleavages still bedevil us; at my university American legal history and American constitutional history are separate courses. Yet as Michael Willrich's well-written study demonstrates, a new generation of legal historians has begun an assault on the divide.	1
Willrich's study is a significant contribution to that project. Focused on the progressive reforms of Chicago's criminal court system, he ties those efforts into a larger story of constitutional theory, even as he situates the reforms in the Progressives' social agenda. In the process, he demonstrates that ideas like "socialized law," which asserted "that law purposefully reshaped society by directly addressing concrete problems of social life" (p. 98), were simultaneously theories designed to correct failings in society, and alternatives to errant constitutional doctrines (pp. 102–04).	. . .

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