This tightly organized book amply achieves the most important goal of professional history: to offer a fair and important question, and then to answer it with a close reading of all relevant sources and a deep appreciation for the context in which they were made. For John Philip Reid in his Legislating the Courts, the inquiry centers on the now-vaunted independence of the American judiciary. Were state and federal courts effectively autonomous in the post-Revolutionary period? Did judges wield appellate jurisdiction over legislative actions? For the state of New Hampshire, the answer is unequivocally: no.

The legislature reigned supreme. It self-consciously asserted itself by limiting and debating judges' salaries. It routinely reopened cases settled by courts, “restoring to law” those plaintiffs or defendants who did not like court decisions. For these reasons, the name of New Hampshire's legislature—the General Court—accurately conveyed its wide and protean powers. Moreover, this court of last resort could and did “address” judges out of office (with the governor's assent) and abolish those judicial bodies not specified by the state constitution (every court in the state). On one occasion in 1816, it did both, addressing out a set of judges whose court it had just abolished. “It was surely a day to be marked in American judicial history,” Reid comments, “but certainly not a day of credit to American constitutional law” (160).

Reid's focus on New Hampshire reflects not only his particular expertise but also the middling position the Granite State held along the early republic's spectrum of judicial autonomy and legislative supremacy. The conceptual antipodes here were the “receptionist” legal tradition, associated with the Federalists, common law, and judicial independence, against an ascendant “republican” legal theory that was “mutable, political, and often fashioned by legislative direction” (85). More broadly, republican law signified a transatlantic effort to vest sovereignty in the contemporary decisions of and for the people or nation, without regard to the internal logic and history of the law itself. (This endeavor reached its ultimate, if rather less democratic, expression in the Napoleonic Civil Code.) In Reid's convincing account, an American version of republican law that lifted legislatures and juries over courts and judges generally prevailed in the early Republic. The deep South, notably Georgia, was its stronghold, although attacks on judicial independence and common law also flared in Pennsylvania. Federalist New England, and especially Massachusetts, was the bastion of receptionist principles. New Hampshire fell somewhere in the middle, and thus offers an excellent case study.

Reid skillfully weaves biographical detail into his analysis and is especially good at recreating the dramas that ensued in and around courts. For example, we gain a vivid and sympathetic portrait of Judge Pickering—the alcoholic and possibly psychotic justice whom the Jeffersonians made a point of impeaching in 1804—and of the various public officials whom he harangued and belittled. The larger importance of such accounts, of course, concerns the very nature of governance in the early United States. For all we know of the various and competing ideologies of the period, the shifting geography of institutional power remains oddly elusive. Reid's book offers an invaluable window onto that terrain, and thus into the larger story of American constitutional development.

There is little question as to where Reid's sympathies lie, as evidenced by references to the “legal fatuities” (6) of the radical Thomas Paine and offhand remarks about “the Jeffersonian disregard for the rule of law” (161). This itself is no criticism; I rather like the narrative edge it adds to the book. But I also wonder if Reid gives republican law both too little and too much credit. After all, the Jeffersonians had every reason to see Federalist judges as reactionary and incorrigible. Why would republicans not object to the continued rule of these judges and of the common law, which meant the enduring authority of the British constitution against which the Revolution had been waged? To his credit, Reid addresses some of the popular sources of antilawyer and antijudiciary sentiment, especially among those “fearful of outside economic sources they could not control” (128). Yet the republican and Jeffersonian leaders who assumed power all over the nation after 1801 proved quite willing to accommodate those alien forces by way of an increasingly commercial-minded common law. To the extent that an American version of republican law emerged at all, it posed far less of a threat to property than Federalists feared. I wonder, then, if Reid's book might have benefited from a fuller engagement with an older historiography in American legal history, one centered on the relation between law and capitalism in American political development.