Law's Machinery: Reforming the Craft of Lawyering in America's Industrial Age

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Kellen R. Funk (Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, Columbia Law School)

Law's Machinery

Reforming the Craft of Lawyering in America's Industrial Age

Kellen R. Funk (Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law, Columbia Law School)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
15 May 2025

History of the Americas; Political science & theory; Legal history; Legal system: general

Series: Oxford Legal History

It was perhaps fitting that in an age of industrialization, Americans began to think of the law as a tool, one that could be forged to fit their needs, without regard to the traditional ways of litigating cases in court. Law's Machinery explores how innovators like New York attorney David Dudley Field, and his associates across the elite American bar, legislated a ""code of practice"" and attempted to rebuild the practice of law from the ground up in the mid-nineteenth century. While many of their efforts proved futile or misguided, the codifiers ultimately succeeded in turning American law into a machine run by, and in the interests of, professional lawyers like themselves. Often overlooked by histories of the world's famous code systems, the United States settled on a code of practice that elevated lawyers as the dominant force of the country's legal institutions. Professor Funk's account ranges widely: from the Jacksonian Era to the end of the Gilded Age; from urban Gotham to the peripheries of the American West and the Reconstruction-era South; and from the parlours of Brooklyn pastors and merchants to the ornamented courthouses of Wall Street. Drawing on innovative methods in digital legal history, Law's Machinery offers a sweeping intellectual, cultural, and political telling of the modernization of American legal practice.

By: Kellen R. Funk (Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law Michael E. Patterson Professor of Law Columbia Law School)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 224mm, Width: 155mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 590g
ISBN: 9780197543931
ISBN 10: 0197543936
Series: Oxford Legal History
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 15 May 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Kellen R. Funk is Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches courses on civil procedure and American Legal History. He has authored pathbreaking works on the use of digital methods in legal history and is now at work on a history of the American bail system. He lives with his family in Princeton, New Jersey.