Book Review

Anthony Chase, a professor of law at Nova Southeastern Law School, synthesizes American legal history into four periods: the Revolution to the Civil War, Reconstruction through World War II, the Korean conflict through the Vietnam era, and the remaining years to the present. According to Chase, legal developments during these periods tracked the changing nature of American capitalism, from the pre-market economy of the colonial era, to the rise of liberal capitalism following the death of slavery, to the welfare state of the New Deal, to the current era of global market capitalism. Drawing on the work of Immanuel Wallerstein and others, Chase insists that the nation's legal history can be understood as a struggle between the forces of liberal and authoritarian capitalism. Throughout Chase gives careful attention to regional tensions. The demise of the peculiar institution in the American South, for example, coupled with the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment placed in the Constitution provisions for due process and equal protection of the laws that did more to unleash market capitalism than they did to assist newly freed slaves. More recently, Chase borrows from the work of Eric Hobsbawm to argue that the "Reaganite Cold War" was concerned not only with destroying the "evil empire" abroad, but also with wrecking specifically the "intrusive state" associated with the New Deal (214).	1
Today, Chase concludes, multinational corporations and international trade agreements have spawned a legal environment that has diminished national sovereignty in favor of international capitalism. The new regime places greater value on private as opposed to public control of critical decisions about the distribution of economic benefits, weakening the spring of any nation's ability to chart its economic future. As the authority of the state recedes, Chase insists, private, corporate interests have and will continue to make most of the critical decisions about the future of the marketplace and the human condition. To the extent that history is prophecy, the past clearly promises a future with "human wreckage left along the way, the flotsam and jetsam cast overboard by laissez faire ideology put into practice on a global scale" (218-19).	2
Chase paints in broad strokes, often frustratingly so. He manages in the space of a little more than two hundred pages, much of which is crowded with extended footnotes, to cite, among others, J. Willard Hurst, Karl Marx, William Greider, Francis Fukayama, and Sandra Day O'Connor. Chase also borrows extensively from his often keen insights into American popular culture, an area where he has earned wide praise as an adept commentator.	3
Taken as a whole, however, there are too many voices in too few pages. What was supposed to be a synthesis often seems more like a hash. Despite the title of the book, Chase never comes to terms with the differences between law and history. He seems less concerned with the methods by which the two disciplines organize understanding of the world than he is with the development of market and legal relations. Chase is entirely correct to remind his readers that capitalism can appear in either liberal (United States) or authoritarian (Nazi Germany and pre-World War II Japan) guises and that the tensions between them can and have sparked war. Yet it remains unclear at book's end how appreciating those differences yields any understanding of substantive legal developments in areas such as torts, contracts, real property, and even corporations. Moreover, even when such matters are addressed in the early chapters they are often not pursued in later ones. There is an excellent discussion of the concept of creative destruction of property rights in pre-Civil War America, but it receives no corresponding attention in such topics as zoning, eminent domain, and land use in the twentieth century. The result is that even the main theme of the book, the relationship between legal rules and market relations, is reported rather than analyzed. Law and History is long on literature and argument but short on substance, detail, and ultimately insight.	4
Chase's writing is clear and graceful, but this virtue is, to an important extent, undermined by his conscious decision to ignore some of the traditional trappings of academic books. He chose not to include an index because he wanted "to prevent people from looking through the index to find their name and only reading the paragraph or two where they were mentioned" (8). Chase seems convinced that even a serious reader would not take time to read an entire book, a debatable conclusion given the commitment of The New Press to publish works that would not normally be commercially viable. The lack of an index, however, makes it difficult to assemble and follow the secondary arguments used throughout the book, even in a work as brief as Chase's. He compounds this problem by placing the bulk of the discussion about the literature of American legal history in long, discursive notes. The book would have benefited enormously from a critical bibliography, especially one that would help the reader to assess from Chase's perspective the relative value of the vast and often disparate literature that he cites.	5
Finally, the book's brevity combined with an emphasis on understanding the intellectual development of law leaves substantial areas of the American legal experience untouched. For example, the legal histories of deviancy and dependency, of families and children, of police and prisons are almost entirely ignored. Yet surely such subjects lend themselves especially well to Chase's concerns with the relationship between the marketplace and the law. The analytical division that Chase embraces, which stresses war as a major line of demarcation, has the effect, as was true with the writings of Grant Gilmore and Karl Llewellyn (whose work informs the structure of Chase's book), of narrowing the topics of study.	6
Nonetheless, the argument that Chase sketches, if not quite the instruments and techniques he employs, has considerable utility. One need only contemplate the impact of the North America Free Trade Act on labor and the circumstances that have prompted Exxon and Mobil to revive John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Corporation to appreciate Chase's provocative concluding observation that the global market has fostered a "new system of international trade relations [that] threatens to become a world legal system" (216).	7
Kermit L. Hall North Carolina State University

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