Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937

Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937
Author: Herbert Hovenkamp
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780674038837

In this integration of law and economic ideas, Herbert Hovenkamp charts the evolution of the legal framework that regulated American business enterprise from the time of Andrew Jackson through the first New Deal. He reveals the interdependent relationship between economic theory and law that existed in these decades of headlong growth and examines how this relationship shaped both the modern business corporation and substantive due process. Classical economic theory--the cluster of ideas about free markets--became the guiding model for the structure and function of both private and public law. Hovenkamp explores the relationship of classical economic ideas to law in six broad areas related to enterprise in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He traces the development of the early business corporation and maps the rise of regulated industry from the first charterbased utilities to the railroads. He argues that free market political economy provided the intellectual background for constitutional theory and helped define the limits of state and federal regulation of business behavior. The book also illustrates the unique American perspective on political economy reflected in the famous doctrine of substantive due process. Finally, Hovenkamp demonstrates the influence of economic theory on labor law and gives us a reexamination of the antitrust movement, the most explicit intersection of law and economics before the New Deal. Legal, economic, and intellectual historians and political scientists will welcome these trenchant insights on an influential period in American constitutional and corporate history.

The Opening of American Law

The Opening of American Law
Author: Herbert Hovenkamp
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 473
Release: 2015
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0199331308

Two late Victorian ideas disrupted American legal thought: the Darwinian theory of evolution and marginalist economics. The legal thought that emerged can be called 'neoclassical', because it embodied ideas that were radically new while retaining many elements of what had gone before. Although Darwinian social science was developed earlier, in most legal disciplines outside of criminal law and race theory marginalist approaches came to dominate. This book carries these themes through a variety of legal subjects in both public and private law.

Law in American History

Law in American History
Author: G. Edward White
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 578
Release: 2012-02-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0195102479

G. Edward White, a leading legal historian, presents Law in American History, a two-volume, comprehensive narrative history of American law from the colonial period to the present. In this first volume, White explores the key turning points in roughly the first half of the American legal system, from the development of order in the colonies, to the signing of the Constitution, to the dissolution of the Union just before the Civil War. Thought-provoking and artfully written, Law in American History, Vol. 1 is an essential text for both students of law and general readers alike.

The People’s Welfare

The People’s Welfare
Author: William J. Novak
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2000-11-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807863653

Much of today's political rhetoric decries the welfare state and our maze of government regulations. Critics hark back to a time before the state intervened so directly in citizens' lives. In The People's Welfare, William Novak refutes this vision of a stateless past by documenting America's long history of government regulation in the areas of public safety, political economy, public property, morality, and public health. Challenging the myth of American individualism, Novak recovers a distinctive nineteenth-century commitment to shared obligations and public duties in a well-regulated society. Novak explores the by-laws, ordinances, statutes, and common law restrictions that regulated almost every aspect of America's society and economy, including fire regulations, inspection and licensing rules, fair marketplace laws, the moral policing of prostitution and drunkenness, and health and sanitary codes. Based on a reading of more than one thousand court cases in addition to the leading legal and political texts of the nineteenth century, The People's Welfare demonstrates the deep roots of regulation in America and offers a startling reinterpretation of the history of American governance.

Misuse of Market Power

Misuse of Market Power
Author: Katharine Kemp
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-06-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1107184762

Compares Australia's new misuse of market power law with US and EU tests for monopolization and abuse of dominance.

The Invention of Enterprise

The Invention of Enterprise
Author: David S. Landes
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2010-01-31
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691143706

This work provides a sweeping history of enterprise in Mesopotamia and Neo-Babylon; carries the reader through the Islamic Middle East; offers insights into the entrepreneurial history of China, Japan, and colonial India; and describes the crucial role of the entrepreneur in innovation activity in the Western world.

Bless the Pure and Humble

Bless the Pure and Humble
Author: Nicholas George Malavis
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 1996
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780890967140

Nicholas George Malavis's well-reasoned and sophisticated study of the development of petroleum regulation offers historical and legal analysis of the basic issues affecting property rights and the public interest and traces the legal moves that shaped a new regulatory system centered around the Texas Railroad Commission. It provides a fascinating view of the multiple roles of lawyers in putting the new system in place as they worked for a variety of clients to resolve the serious conflicts plaguing the oil industry in its efforts to manage overproduction in the 1920s and 1930s. Access to the internal records of Vinson and Elkins has allowed Malavis to provide readers a rare view inside the world of lawyer-client relations. He describes how prominent attorney James Elkins and others applied their legal talents, negotiating skills, and political influence to fight for solutions to the problems that would help define the parameters of the new prorating system.

Antimonopoly and American Democracy

Antimonopoly and American Democracy
Author: Crane
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 505
Release: 2023-10-20
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0197744664

Americans today worry about concentrated power in private industry to an extent not seen in generations. Not only do they find diminished diversity of service-providers and producers, but they are disquieted by the power of a few large companies to shape and constrain democratic processes. Americans across the political spectrum, from former President Donald Trump to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, have sounded alarms about the overlarge power of business in both public and private life. While many of the technologies and industries that worry Americans are new, the concerns they've raised are not unprecedented. Antimonopoly and American Democracy traces the history of antimonopoly politics in the United States, arguing that organized action against concentrated economic power comprises an important American democratic tradition. While prevailing narratives tend to treat monopoly as a risk to people mainly in their roles as consumers--by causing prices to increase, for example--this study broadens the conversation, recounting ways in which monopolism can hurt ordinary people without directly impacting their wallets. From the pre-revolutionary era to the age of Big Tech, the volume explores the effects that historical monopolies have had on democracy by using their wealth and influence to dominate electoral politics and regulation. Chapters also highlight a range of sites of economic concentration, from land ownership to media reach, and attempts at combating them, from labor organizing to constitutional revision. Featuring original scholarship from some of the world's leading experts in American economic, political, and legal history, Antimonopoly and American Democracy offers important lessons for our contemporary political moment, in which fears of concentrated wealth and influence are again on the rise.

A History of Socially Responsible Business, c.1600–1950

A History of Socially Responsible Business, c.1600–1950
Author: William A Pettigrew
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-10-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3319601466

This book examines the changing reciprocal relationships between corporations and their various social obligations over the very long term - from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Chapters from emerging and established business historians assess the full range of social obligations that corporations held historically. By adopting an innovative methodological approach that is long-term and comparative, this book offers a challenge to the literature on corporate history and will be of interest to researchers and academics in the field of finance and business history.