Book Review

This hefty volume comprises eighty-six essays on law in the American West written by thirty-seven different authors. The contributions vary in length from two to thirty-nine pages, averaging six pages each. The book contains thirteen sections, titled, "Law Making," "Criminal Law and Justice," "Water Law," "Mining Law," "Law for American Indians," "Mormons and the Law," "Law and Land," "Law and Business," "Labor Law," "Taxation," "Municipal Corporation Law," "Race and Gender," and "Environmental Law." Most of the essays focus on appellate court cases, constitutional provisions, or case studies of legal principles. Bakken selected the case and topics, then assigned them to the authors, following the format of John W. Johnson's Historic U.S. Court Cases, 1690–1990: An Encyclopedia (New York, 1992). With a few exceptions, he avoided the cases treated in that volume. All in all, this is an impressive and useful compendium.

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An excellent essay by John Philip Reid, the dean of western legal historians, sets the tone of the volume. Too much legal history, Reid warns, focuses on how it should be written, rather than on jurisprudence in action. The legal history written in law schools too often favors arcane discussions of methodology over narrative. Reid sees many layers of western legal history. One of the most important of these, he thinks, treats "frontier legal history," which includes the interaction of Anglo-American, Spanish, French, and Native American conceptions of law. Another important layer of legal history concerns law peculiar to the American West as a region, including rules and decisions pertaining to cattle drives and the open range, fur companies, water, and Mormons. He maintains that western legal historians are particularly well-suited to study "law-mindedness" in the United States--how the law affected the values and behavior of ordinary citizens. Westerners wrote far more diaries--diaries that survived and reached print--than the easterners who settled colonial America. Reid lays out an ambitious research agenda, and does so with clarity and discrimination. It is a wise, direct, and helpful essay. Nevertheless, as Bakken points out, most of Reid's topics relate to the frontier, and they neglect law in the twentieth century.

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