Dismantling American Common Law: Liberty and Justice in Our Transformed Courts

The American system of law has experienced a quiet revolution that has gone largely unnoticed by political scientists and legal scholars. The change that has occurred— the abandonment of the common law foundation on which the American judicial system was built—has important consequences for democratic politics in the United States and abroad. Dismantling American Common Law: Liberty and Justice in Our Transformed Courts tracks the development of the American common law through historical and quantitative analysis and a philosophical inquiry of the founding. Author Kyle Scott seeks to reclaim this lost tradition of common law, which was vital as a legitimizing force and consensus-building mechanism at the American founding and will grow in importance for newly democratizing nations around the world.