| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature. By Gregg D. Crane. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xii, 299 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-521-80684-4. Paper, $22.00, ISBN 0-521-01093-4.)

Gregg D. Crane's Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature offers a valuable chapter in the ongoing narrative that many of the best young lawyers–cum–English professors have been writing in recent years—the story of the dynamic and manifold ways in which literary culture and texts have helped to shape the direction of the law and to frame its most charged debates. To be legitimate, the proponents of higher law tradition insisted, a law must first be just, and it was in the imaginary landscape of literature that higher law activists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe tried and convicted the Fugitive Slave Act and the battery of laws that defined and defended the system of chattel slavery itself. As Crane argues, literature preserves and extends the Founders' higher law constitutionalism, preserving it as a dynamic alternative to the newly dominant positivism of postrevolutionary generations of legal and political professionals eager to read the Constitution as an unambiguous expression of majority power.

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