Law and Markets in United States History PDF Download

Author: James Willard Hurst
Publisher: The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.
ISBN: 1584771364
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
The eminent legal scholar James Willard Hurst's sociological analysis of the relation between law and private business in relation to society at large Hurst argues that law and business support the same goals of efficiency and humanity, and examines their interrelationship toward that end in terms of ethical issues related to public policy, money supply, the impact of incremental change, inflation and deflation, monopoly and competition, and other economic factors. Based on Hurst's lectures at The University of Wisconsin in April, 1981. James Willard Hurst [1910-1997] is widely recognized as the father of modern American legal history. He taught at University of Wisconsin Law School. A prolific scholar and writer, Hurst's major works include The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (1950), Law and The Conditions of Freedom in The Nineteenth-century United States (1956), Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Wisconsin Lumber Industry 1835-1916 (1964), Law and Social Process in U.S. History (1960) and Law and Social Order in the United States (1977). CONTENTS Introduction: The Market, the Law, and Challenges of Scarcity Chapter 1 Law and the Constitution of the Market Chapter 2 The Market in Social Context Chapter 3 Bargaining through Law and through Markets Notes Sources Cited Index

Author: James W. Hurst
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780783737492
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Author: William J. Novak
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
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.

Author: Bernard E. Harcourt
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674971329
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
It is widely believed today that the free market is the best mechanism ever invented to efficiently allocate resources in society. Just as fundamental as faith in the free market is the belief that government has a legitimate and competent role in policing and the punishment arena. This curious incendiary combination of free market efficiency and the Big Brother state has become seemingly obvious, but it hinges on the illusion of a supposedly natural order in the economic realm. The Illusion of Free Markets argues that our faith in “free markets” has severely distorted American politics and punishment practices. Bernard Harcourt traces the birth of the idea of natural order to eighteenth-century economic thought and reveals its gradual evolution through the Chicago School of economics and ultimately into today’s myth of the free market. The modern category of “liberty” emerged in reaction to an earlier, integrated vision of punishment and public economy, known in the eighteenth century as “police.” This development shaped the dominant belief today that competitive markets are inherently efficient and should be sharply demarcated from a government-run penal sphere. This modern vision rests on a simple but devastating illusion. Superimposing the political categories of “freedom” or “discipline” on forms of market organization has the unfortunate effect of obscuring rather than enlightening. It obscures by making both the free market and the prison system seem natural and necessary. In the process, it facilitated the birth of the penitentiary system in the nineteenth century and its ultimate culmination into mass incarceration today.

Author: Mike Konczal
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620975386
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The progressive economics writer redefines the national conversation about American freedom “Mike Konczal [is] one of our most powerful advocates of financial reform‚ [a] heroic critic of austerity‚ and a huge resource for progressives.”—Paul Krugman Health insurance, student loan debt, retirement security, child care, work-life balance, access to home ownership—these are the issues driving America’s current political debates. And they are all linked, as this brilliant and timely book reveals, by a single question: should we allow the free market to determine our lives? In the tradition of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, noted economic commentator Mike Konczal answers this question with a resounding no. Freedom from the Market blends passionate political argument and a bold new take on American history to reveal that, from the earliest days of the republic, Americans have defined freedom as what we keep free from the control of the market. With chapters on the history of the Homestead Act and land ownership, the eight-hour work day and free time, social insurance and Social Security, World War II day cares, Medicare and desegregation, free public colleges, intellectual property, and the public corporation, Konczal shows how citizens have fought to ensure that everyone has access to the conditions that make us free. At a time when millions of Americans—and more and more politicians—are questioning the unregulated free market, Freedom from the Market offers a new narrative, and new intellectual ammunition, for the fight that lies ahead.

Author: Jerry Markham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317466373
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
First Published in 2014. This book maps the issues and traces the U.S. government's efforts to properly regulate, monitor, and prevent financial speculation and price manipulation in various markets. It begins with the period from the late nineteenth century to the first congressional efforts at regulation in the 1930s and continues on to the present, with a full chapter on the legal and financial aspects of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The book also discusses the difficulty of initiating successful prosecutions of financial fraud and price manipulation and proposes a new approach to preventing manipulative practices.

Author: James Willard Hurst
Publisher: Beard Books
ISBN: 9781587980985
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Fascinating reading for those interested in the cause and effect relations between legal processes and economic processes and those concerned with separation of powers and public administration.

Author: Michel Callon
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631206088
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
With the collapse of the planned economies of Eastern Europe, the market is extending its reach and at the same time claiming its universal applicability.

Author: Jon C. Dubin
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479811025
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
How social security disability law is out of touch with the contemporary American labor market Passing down nearly a million decisions each year, more judges handle disability cases for the Social Security Administration than federal civil and criminal cases combined. In Social Security Disability Law and the American Labor Market, Jon C. Dubin challenges the contemporary policies for determining disability benefits and work assessment. He posits the fundamental questions: where are the jobs for persons with significant medical and vocational challenges? And how does the administration misfire in its standards and processes for answering that question? Deploying his profound understanding of the Social Security Administration and Disability law and policy, he demystifies the system, showing us its complex inner mechanisms and flaws, its history and evolution, and how changes in the labor market have rendered some agency processes obsolete. Dubin lays out how those who advocate eviscerating program coverage and needed life support benefits in the guise of modernizing these procedures would reduce the capacity for the Social Security Administration to function properly and serve its intended beneficiaries, and argues that the disability system should instead be “mended, not ended.” Dubin argues that while it may seem counterintuitive, the transformation from an industrial economy to a twenty-first-century service economy in the information age, with increased automation, and resulting diminished demand for arduous physical labor, has not meaningfully reduced the relevance of, or need for, the disability benefits programs. Indeed, they have created new and different obstacles to work adjustments based on the need for other skills and capacities in the new economy—especially for the significant portion of persons with cognitive, psychiatric, neuro-psychological, or other mental impairments. Therefore, while the disability program is in dire need of empirically supported updating and measures to remedy identified deficiencies, obsolescence, inconsistencies in application, and racial, economic and other inequities, the program’s framework is sufficiently broad and enduring to remain relevant and faithful to the Act’s congressional beneficent purposes and aspirations.

Author: Morton J. HORWITZ
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674038789
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
In a remarkable book based on prodigious research, Morton J. Horwitz offers a sweeping overview of the emergence of a national (and modern) legal system from English and colonial antecedents. He treats the evolution of the common law as intellectual history and also demonstrates how the shifting views of private law became a dynamic element in the economic growth of the United States. Horwitz's subtle and sophisticated explanation of societal change begins with the common law, which was intended to provide justice for all. The great breakpoint came after 1790 when the law was slowly transformed to favor economic growth and development. The courts spurred economic competition instead of circumscribing it. This new instrumental law flourished as the legal profession and the mercantile elite forged a mutually beneficial alliance to gain wealth and power. The evolving law of the early republic interacted with political philosophy, Horwitz shows. The doctrine of laissez-faire, long considered the cloak for competition, is here seen as a shield for the newly rich. By the 1840s the overarching reach of the doctrine prevented further distribution of wealth and protected entrenched classes by disallowing the courts very much power to intervene in economic life. This searching interpretation, which connects law and the courts to the real world, will engage historians in a new debate. For to view the law as an engine of vast economic transformation is to challenge in a stunning way previous interpretations of the eras of revolution and reform.