Search results for ""Author John Phillip Reid""

In the first decades of the nineteeth century, legal reformers in the United States strove to standardize courtroom procedures and expand judges' power at the expense of jurors while simultaneously imposing uniformity upon judicial decision making. Reid's previous book, Controlling the Law, offered a case study of this process, focusing on New Hampshire Chief Justice Jeremiah Smith and Governor William Plumer. Now in Legislating the Courts, Reid returns to the careers of Smith and Plumer to continue the story of judicial authority in the early republic. American constitutional historians and lawyers generally assume that the current doctrine of judicial supremacy not only has always been the rule of constitutional law but was the original intent of the framers of both the federal and state constitutions. This study disproves the validity of that assumption for state constitutionalism by concentrating on the law of New Hampshire—representative of the law in other jurisdictions—between the years 1789 and 1818. Legislating the Courts does not argue that judicial independence was not the desired rule among the framers of the constitutions; instead, by looking at both practice and constitutional theory, this study shows that the reality for the early republic was both judicial dependence and legislative supremacy. To illustrate his points, Reid refers to three government practices that together with other matters altered judicial salaries—mandated by the constitution to be "permanent" and "honorable"—and that created a dependent judicial system. The first practice, "restoring litigants to their law," gave litigants who had lost a jury trial and had judgments pronounced against them the option to petition the legislature to be relieved from the judgment and to be granted a new jury trial. In the second practice the legislature acted on the premise that it had the authority to investigate the conduct of judges and require them to explain why they behaved in certain ways. Finally, in the third practice, the legislature exercised the authority to remove judges from their tenure at "good behavior" by "legislating" them out of office and then appointing a new bench. Despite an attempt to subordinate the judiciary to the will of the citizenry, as represented by the state legislature, Reid finds that judges managed to maintain their autonomy, subject only to the dictates of the law.

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John Phillip Reid is widely known for his groundbreaking work in American legal history. A Law of Blood, first published in the early 1970s, led the way in an additional newly emerging academic field: American Indian history. As the field has flourished, this book has remained an authoritative text. Indeed, Gordon Morris Bakken writes in the foreword to this edition that Reid's original study "shaped scholarship and inquiry for decades." Forging the research methods that fellow historians would soon adopt, Reid carefully examines the organization and rules of Cherokee clans and towns. Investigating the role of women in Cherokee society, for example, he found that married Cherokee women had more legal authority than their counterparts in Anglo-American society. In particular, Reid explores the Cherokees' revolutionary attitudes toward government and the unique relationship between the members of the tribe and their law. Before the first European contact, the Cherokee Nation had already developed a functioning government, and by the early nineteenth century, the first Cherokee constitution had been enacted.

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John Phillip Reid is one of the most highly regarded historians of law as it was practiced on the state level in the nascent United States. He is not just the recipient of numerous honors for his scholarship but the type of historian after whom such accolades are named: the John Phillip Reid Award is given annually by the American Society for Legal History to the author of the best book by a mid-career or senior scholar. Legitimating the Law is the third installment in a trilogy of books by Reid that seek to extend our knowledge about the judicial history of the early republic by recounting the development of courts, laws, and legal theory in New Hampshire. Here Reid turns his eye toward the professionalization of law and the legitimization of legal practices in the Granite State—customs and codes of professional conduct that would form the basis of judiciaries in other states and that remain the cornerstone of our legal system to this day throughout the US. Legitimating the Law chronicles the struggle by which lawyers and torchbearers of strong, centralized government sought to bring standards of competence to New Hampshire through the professionalization of the bench and the bar—ambitions that were fought vigorously by both Jeffersonian legislators and anti-Federalists in the private sector alike, but ultimately to no avail.

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