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The Cambridge History of Law in America (CHOLIA) is part of the Cambridge Modern History series, a string of collectively written scholarly gems that the great legal historian Frederick W. Maitland helped initiate in 1896. Editors Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins have recruited an impressive phalanx of scholars to explore American legal history from a wide variety of perspectives. CHOLIA consists of three volumes: Early America, The Long Nineteenth Century, and The Twentieth Century and After. Grossberg and Tomlins assert that this three-way periodization “challenges existing understandings” (xv), and indeed it deviates from the standard bisection of U.S. history at 1877. The CHOLIA periodization, however, will feel natural to readers weaned on the scholarship of J. Willard Hurst, the dean of American legal historians, whose interests roughly matched the period covered in the volume under review: The Long Nineteenth Century (1789–1920).

As Grossberg and Tomlins note, Hurst's explorations of nineteenth-century law and economic development “set the agenda of American legal historians from the 1950s well into the 1980s” (xii). The nineteen essays in CHOLIA's volume 2 reveal that the Hurstian approach to legal history, though still relevant, has been largely supplanted by, in the editors' words, an “astonishing variety” of approaches. The editors delight in that variety. Their authors—some well established, others up and coming—employ diverse methodologies and discuss a wide range of topics. Grossberg and Tomlins appear to have driven them with a loose rein but a ready crop, urging them both to summarize the existing state of knowledge in their respective subfields and to contribute original research and new approaches. CHOLIA thus affords readers a rare opportunity to assess where American legal-historical scholarship currently is and where it might be heading.

Volume 2 blends history and law but tilts toward the former. With some exceptions—most notably Karen Orren's chapter on the laws of industrial organization—authors dwell less upon legal doctrine than upon social and cultural context. Indeed, Sarah Barringer Gordon concludes her excellent chapter on law and religion with the observation that her story's historical facets are more interesting and important than its legal facets.

The volume's nineteen essays divide into four categories. (These groupings are mine; other readers will enjoy developing their own.) The first group covers what might be termed core legal history topics. If we imagine legal history as a swirling nebula whose outer regions mix with neighboring disciplines, these four chapters—legal education and thought, the legal profession, the courts, and criminal justice—would occupy the center. These chapters' themes are of fundamental importance to legal historians but of comparatively limited importance to scholars in adjoining fields. Consequently, although these chapters display impressive scholarship (as in the late Kermit Hall's elegant discussion of courts) and theoretical sophistication (as in Elizabeth Dale's provocative treatment of criminal justice), the temperature of scholarly debate here is low.

Farthest from the core, on the discipline's ever-expanding boundaries, float five chapters dealing with topics not always approached as legal history: popular culture, religion, technology, the military, and international affairs. The authors of these chapters principally engage scholarship from disciplines outside standard legal history. Consequently, their arguments, however provocative—for example, Nan Goodman's claim that “the law can be found in novels and parades, as much as in cases and statutes” (415)—tend not to resonate with other chapters. In terms of legal-historical scholarship as a whole, the temperature of scholarly debate here is also comparatively low.

Higher temperatures are to be found in the two middle layers. Close to the core lies an older, cooling debate—one whose origins trace back at least to Morton Horwitz and Willard Hurst—about law and capitalism during the nineteenth century. Multiple authors at least implicitly address the “subsidy thesis”—the once-boiling revisionist argument that pro-business nineteenth-century common law rulings forced farmers and workers to subsidize industrialization. The authors acknowledge this argument's partial validity but give more attention to its substantial limitations. More robust than the “subsidy thesis” debate in this layer of scholarship are discussions of state-building. Mark Wilson, whose thought-provoking chapter opens the volume, argues that the antebellum U.S. state was “substantial and energetic.” William Forbath, whose fine essay closes the volume, argues just the opposite. In addition, Wilson, Forbath, and others extensively analyze the causes of state growth during the century.

The final group of essays lies at the very heart of the book, both physically (chapters 6 through 11) and substantively. This section emits the volume's greatest interpretive energy. Unlike the “subsidy” debate, which emphasizes social class, these essays address race, “citizenship,” and, to a lesser extent, gender. They explore immigration and citizenship, indigenous peoples, marriage and domestic relations, slavery and antislavery, and the Civil War and Reconstruction (with special emphasis on race). Unlike the book's other sections, this one closes with an overview essay that elucidates general patterns suggested by the section's other chapters. This essay, by Barbara Welke, is subtitled “Borders of Belonging,” a subtitle that captures the section's general theme. Welke's three-part argument is perhaps the book's most provocative: (1) throughout the long nineteenth century, the law privileged white men and excluded women and “racialized others” from the “borders of belonging”; (2) despite the appearance of progress (e.g., emancipation), every incursion on white male privilege “was met by a consolidation, so that in some fundamental way the century did not ‘progress’ at all” (357); and (3) racialized and gendered power “were critical in shaping the twentieth-century American state” (346). Welke's arguments invite further scholarly consideration.

Nitpickers will have minor complaints about this volume. Repetition is an occasional problem, as when nearly interchangeable sections on legal education appear in chapters 2 and 3. The opposite problem, omission, is also a petty annoyance, as when several authors mention, but none explains, the common law writ system and its decline. The index, vital to a compilation of this sort, is uneven and in places deficient. (The famous Charles River Bridge case appears in multiple chapters but not in the index.) Though generally accessible to a broad readership, the book contains occasional bits of unexplained jargon, for example, the “third-party beneficiary rule,” that may frustrate nonspecialists. Traditionalists may not be pleased that the book devotes far more space to, say, Chinese immigration than to, say, Marbury v. Madison. History wonks who enjoy identifying errors will stay busy circling the incorrect dates listed for: the Civil Rights Cases, the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Haymarket riot, the Scopes “Monkey” trial, the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, the New Deal-era “Switch in Time,” the Dawes Severalty Act, the annexation of Texas, and the Compromise of 1877.

Nonetheless, the Cambridge History of Law in America deserves nothing but praise. It is the single best starting point for knowledge of America's legal past. It exemplifies the field's intellectual vitality and showcases some of its brightest stars. Graduate students will find the chapter-by-chapter bibliographic essays alone worth the purchase price. Volume 2 captures the state of the field today and suggests many possible future paths. (I would vote for more international comparisons.) The academy owes Grossberg, Tomlins, and their team of scholars a standing ovation.