The Law Practice Of Alexander Hamilton

Although deconstruction has become a popular catchword, as an intellectual movement it has never entirely caught on within the university. For some in the academy, deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are responsible for the demise of accountability in the study of literature. Countering these facile dismissals of Derrida and deconstruction, Herman Rapaport explores the incoherence that has plagued critical theory since the 1960s and the resulting legitimacy crisis in the humanities. Against the backdrop of a rich, informed discussion of Derrida's writings -- and how they have been misconstrued by critics and admirers alike -- The Theory Mess investigates the vicissitudes of Anglo-American criticism over the past thirty years and proposes some possibilities for reform.

Although deconstruction has become a popular catchword, as an intellectual movement it has never entirely caught on within the university. For some in the academy, deconstruction, and Jacques Derrida in particular, are responsible for the demise of accountability in the study of literature. Countering these facile dismissals of Derrida and deconstruction, Herman Rapaport explores the incoherence that has plagued critical theory since the 1960s and the resulting legitimacy crisis in the humanities. Against the backdrop of a rich, informed discussion of Derrida's writings -- and how they have been misconstrued by critics and admirers alike -- The Theory Mess investigates the vicissitudes of Anglo-American criticism over the past thirty years and proposes some possibilities for reform.

Alexander Hamilton is commonly seen as the standard-bearer of an ideology-turned-political party, the Federalists, engaged in a struggle for the soul of the young United States against the Anti-Federalists, and later, the Jeffersonian Republicans. Alexander Hamilton and the Development of American Law counters such conventional wisdom with a new, more nuanced view of Hamilton as a true federalist, rather than a one-dimensional nationalist, whose most important influence on the American founding is his legal legacy. In this analytical biography, Kate Elizabeth Brown recasts our understanding of Hamilton's political career, his policy achievements, and his significant role in the American founding by considering him first and foremost as a preeminent lawyer who applied law and legal arguments to accomplish his statecraft. In particular, Brown shows how Hamilton used inherited English legal principles to accomplish his policy goals, and how state and federal jurists adapted these Hamiltonian principles into a distinct, republican jurisprudence throughout the nineteenth century. When writing his authoritative commentary on the nature of federal constitutional power in The Federalist, Hamilton juxtaposed the British constitution with the new American one he helped to create; when proposing commercial, monetary, banking, administrative, or foreign policy in Washington's cabinet, he used legal arguments to justify his desired course of action. In short, lawyering, legal innovation, and common law permeated Alexander Hamilton's professional career. Re-examining Hamilton's post-war accomplishments through the lens of law, Brown demonstrates that Hamilton's much-studied political career, as well as his contributions to republican political science, cannot be fully understood without recognizing and investigating how Hamilton used Anglo-American legal principles to achieve these ends. A critical re-evaluation of Hamilton's legacy, as well as his place in the founding era, Brown’s work also enhances and refines our understanding of the nature and history of American jurisprudence.

In 1773 John Adams observed that one source of tension in the debate between England and the colonies could be traced to the different conceptions each side had of the terms "legally" and "constitutionally"--different conceptions that were, as Shannon Stimson here demonstrates, symptomatic of deeper jurisprudential, political, and even epistemological differences between the two governmental outlooks. This study of the political and legal thought of the American revolution and founding period explores the differences between late eighteenth-century British and American perceptions of the judicial and jural power. In Stimson's book, which will interest both historians and theorists of law and politics, the study of colonial juries provides an incisive tool for organizing, interpreting, and evaluating various strands of American political theory, and for challenging the common assumption of a basic unity of vision of the roots of Anglo-American jurisprudence. The author introduces an original concept, that of "judicial space," to account for the development of the highly political role of the Supreme Court, a judicial body that has no clear counterpart in English jurisprudence. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.