The People's Government: Law and the Creation of a Modern American State, 1877-1932
Author: William J. Novak
This project is the second installment in a more long term effort to write a legal history of the American State and Police Power from the American Revolution to the present. The first segment of the project, “The People’s Welfare,” confronted some persistent myths about laissez-faire in the early United States by uncovering a distinctive tradition of extensive social and economic police regulation captured in a plethora of local laws regulating public property, public safety, public health, public morals, and public economy from top to bottom – from Sunday laws to prohibitions on the carting of offal (essentially, 19th century hazardous waste).
While acknowledging some continuities in terms of the presence of police regulation in every historical period, the current project tells a different story – the story of the transformation of that early American legal-political regime – the decline of a world of local, common-law, self-governance (a well-regulated society), and the rise of a distinctly modern administrative state in the U.S. – a state insistently expanding its general police and regulatory authority.