Legal Mobilization and Institution-Building for Local Governance in the Early American Republic, 1820-1850

• In Event: 036 - Section on Sociology of Law Paper Session. Legal Mobilization and Institutional Politics

Abstract

LEGAL MOBILIZATION AND POLITICAL INSTITUTION-BUILDING
IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
The Courts, Whig Social Ordering and the Rights-Based
Discourse of Democratic Liberalism, 1820-1860

In recent years a remarkable spate of attempts at democratic transition have occurred. After their first heady days, virtually every one has floundered, if not foundered, on the shoals of daily governance. It is significant that a phase of republican rule, which characterized the early days of popular rule in Western Europe and the United States, has been absent in each of these newly ‘democratic’ countries. It is argued in this paper that a phase of legal mobilization under the leadership of local Whig political elites, as part of a phase of republican rule, provided a window for building institutions of local governance that stabilized popular rule. Paradoxically, law, which had been used as a language of Revolution during the 1770s, became, during the early post-Revolutionary period a force that limited transformation as it upheld the existing social order and the inequalities remaining in it. Yet, that very stability ultimately sowed the seeds of a legal counter-mobilization as upstart Democrats constructed political resistance around a new rights-based discourse more consonant with their experience and their interests.

Author

• Mary E. Vogel, University of Manchester