Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T18:06:45.741Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Public Interest to Private Rights: Free Speech, Liberal Individualism, and the Making of Modern Tort Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Laura M. Weinrib
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Drawing on John Witt's 2007 book, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law, this essay explores the role of the interwar civil liberties movement in rehabilitating the discourse of rights and privatizing the American welfare state. In the years after World War I, most proponents of free speech were hostile to Lochner‐era legalism and preferred to pursue civil liberties through legislative and regulatory measures as a means of advancing the public interest. By the onset of World War II, however, they had instead adopted a court‐centered strategy that emphasized individual autonomy. The popular and political resonance of their new state‐skeptical vocabulary suggests that post‐New Deal liberalism in America was a hybrid of classical and Progressive approaches.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , Winter 2009 , pp. 187 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2009 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bergstrom, Randolph. 1992. Courting Danger: Injury and Law in New York City, 1870–1910. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Brandeis, Louis. 1934. The Curse of Bigness: Miscellaneous Papers of Louis D. Brandeis. Ed. Fraenkel, Osmond K. New York: Viking Press.Google Scholar
Brinkley, Alan. 1995. The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Broun, Heywood. 1930. It Seems to Me by Heywood Broun. New York World Telegram, March 5.Google Scholar
Capozzola, Christopher. 2008. Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Chafee, Zechariah. 1919. Freedom of Speech in War Time. Harvard Law Review 32:932–73.Google Scholar
Chafee, Zechariah. 1920. Freedom of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Howe.Google Scholar
Cushman, Barry. 1998. Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Dennis, Donna I. 2005. Obscenity Regulation, New York City, and the Creation of American Erotica, 1820–1880. PhD diss., Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.Google Scholar
Ernst, Morris L. 1926. Who Shall Control the Air? The Nation, April 21, vol. 122, 43.Google Scholar
Ernst, Morris L. 1940. Too Big. Boston: Little, Brown and Co.Google Scholar
Ernst, Morris L., and Lindey, Alexander. 1940. The Censor Marches On: Recent Milestones in the Administration of the Obscenity Law in the United States. New York: Doubleday, Doran.Google Scholar
Feld, Rose. 1940. Down with Censors! A Crusading Chronicle of Their Constant Threat to Books, Movies and Radio. New York Herald Tribune Books, February 11, 4 IX.Google Scholar
Fiss, Owen. 2002. The Idea of Political Freedom. In Looking Back at Law's Century, ed. Sarat, Austin, Garth, Bryant, and Kagan, Robert A., 35–57. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence M., and Russell, Thomas D. 1990. More Civil Wrongs: Personal Injury Litigation, 1901–1910. American Journal of Legal History 34:295–314.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E. 1991. Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E. 1999. Caste, Class, and Equal Citizenship. Michigan Law Review 98:1–91.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E. 2006. The Long Life of Liberal America: Law and State‐Building in the U.S. and England. Law and History Review 24:179–92.Google Scholar
Forbath, William E. 2007. Politics, State Building, and the Courts, 1870–1920. University of Texas Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 113. http://ssrn.com/abstract=958104 (accessed October 1, 2008).Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc. 1974. Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change. Law & Society Review 9:95–160.Google Scholar
Goodman, James. 1994. Stories of Scottsboro. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa Lauren. 2001. The Thirteenth Amendment and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights. Duke Law Journal 50:1609–86.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa Lauren. 2006. Deaths Greatly Exaggerated. Law and History Review 24:201–08.Google Scholar
Goluboff, Risa Lauren. 2007. The Lost Promise of Civil Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert W. 1975. J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography. Law & Society Review 10:9–44.Google Scholar
Graber, Mark A. 1991. Transforming Free Speech: The Ambiguous Legacy of Civil Libertarianism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Green, Thomas A. 1995. Freedom and Criminal Responsibility in the Age of Pound: An Essay on Criminal Justice. Michigan Law Review 93:1915–2053.Google Scholar
Henretta, James A. 1996. Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America. Law and History Review 24:115–71.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Morton J. 1992. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kagan, Robert. 2001. Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Karsten, Peter. 1997. Heart versus Head: Judge‐Made Law in Nineteenth Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Klein, Jennifer. 2003. For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public‐Private Welfare State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Leuchtenburg, William E. The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McEvoy, Arthur F. 1994. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911: Social Change, Industrial Accidents, and the Evolution of Commonsense Causality. Chicago: American Bar Association.Google Scholar
Nelson, William Edward. 2001. The Legalist Reformation: Law, Politics, and Ideology in New York, 1920–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Novak, William J. 2008. The Myth of the “Weak” American State. American Historical Review 113:752–72.Google Scholar
Post, Robert. 2006. Federalism, Positive Law, and the Emergence of the American Administrative State: Prohibition in the Taft Court Era. William & Mary Law Review 48:1–182.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1905. Do We Need a Philosophy of Law? Columbia Law Review 5:339–53.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1908a. Common Law and Legislation. Harvard Law Review 21:383–406.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1908b. Mechanical Jurisprudence. Columbia Law Review 8:605–23.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1909. Liberty of Contract. Yale Law Journal 18:454–86.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1910. Law in Books and Law in Action. American Law Review 44:12–36.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1913. The Administration of Justice in the Modern City. Harvard Law Review 26:302–28.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1915. Interests of Personality. Harvard Law Review 28:343–65 and 28:445–56 (2 parts).Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1938. The Formative Era of American Law. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.Google Scholar
Pound, Roscoe. 1954. The Role of the Will in Law. Harvard Law Review 68:1–19.Google Scholar
Primus, Richard A. 1999. The American Language of Rights. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Prude, Jonathan. 1973. Portrait of a Civil Libertarian: The Faith and Fear of Zechariah Chafee, Jr. Journal of American History 60:633–56.Google Scholar
Purcell, Edward A. 1973. The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific Naturalism and the Problem of Value. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.Google Scholar
Rabban, David M. 1997. Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years, 1870–1920. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rogers, Donald W. 1995. From Common Law to Factory Laws: The Transformation of Workplace Safety Law in Wisconsin before Progressivism. American Journal of Legal History 39:177–213.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. 1982. In Search of Progressivism. Reviews in American History 10:113–32.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. 1987. Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Rodgers, Daniel T. 1998. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Schiller, Reuel. 2000. Free Speech and Expertise: Administrative Censorship and the Birth of the Modern First Amendment. University of Virginia Law Review 86:1–102.Google Scholar
Scheingold, Stuart A. 2004. The Politics of Rights: Lawyers, Public Policy, and Political Change, 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Shepherd, George. 1996. Fierce Compromise: The Administrative Procedure Act Emerges from New Deal Politics. Northwestern University Law Review 90:1557–1683.Google Scholar
Simon, Jonathan. 2002. Visions of Self‐Control: Fashioning a Liberal Approach to Crime and Punishment in the Twentieth Century. In Looking Back at Law's Century, ed. Sarat, Austin, Garth, Bryant, and Kagan, Robert A., 109–50. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Spillenger, Clyde. 2001. David M. Rabban and the Libertarian Tradition That Time Forgot. Law & Social Inquiry 26 (1): 209–42.Google Scholar
Stansell, Christine. 2000. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Sunstein, Cass R. 1987. Constitutionalism after the New Deal. Harvard Law Review 101:421–510.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher L. 1993. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tushnet, Mark V. 1987. The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Walker, Samuel. 1999. In Defense of American Liberties: a History of the ACLU, 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Welke, Barbara Young. 2001. Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wertheimer, John. 1992. Free Speech Fights: The Roots of Modern Free‐Expression Litigation in the United States. PhD diss., Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.Google Scholar
White, G. Edward. 2003. Tort Law in America: An Intellectual History, expanded ed. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Wigdor, David. 1974. Roscoe Pound: Philosophy of Law. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.Google Scholar
Willrich, Michael. 2003. City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian. 2004a. The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian. 2004b. Crystal Eastman and the Internationalist Beginnings of American Civil Liberties. Duke Law Journal 54:705–63.Google Scholar
Witt, John Fabian. 2007. Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar