In the second half of the nineteenth century, the majority of U.S. states adopted a novel code of legal practice for their civil courts. Legal scholars have long recognized the influence of the New York lawyer David Dudley Field on American legal codification, but tracing the influence of Field’s code of civil procedure with precision across some 30,000 pages of statutes is a daunting task. By adapting methods of digital text analysis to observe text reuse in legal sources, this article provides a methodological guide to show how the evolution of law can be studied at a macro level—across many codes and jurisdictions—and at a micro level—regulation by regulation. Applying these techniques to the Field Code and its emulators, we show that by a combination of creditors’ remedies the code exchanged the rhythms of agriculture for those of merchant capitalism. Archival research confirmed that the spread of the Field Code united the American South and American West in one Greater Reconstruction. Instead of just a national political development centered in Washington, we show that Reconstruction was also a state-level legal development centered on a procedure code from the Empire State of finance capitalism.
Histories of the American debates over codifying the common law uncritically treat nineteenthcenturycodifiers as the forerunners of modern statutory supremacy. What these accounts miss is thepervasive religious rhetoric and theology underlying the codification debates. American codifiersuniversally adopted a liberal Protestant approach to the perspicuity of texts and the unmediatedauthority of individual interpreters that was common to their time (features that distinguishedAmerican codification from similar efforts in England and Europe). They were rebuffed by commonlaw lawyers who emphasized the inherent slipperiness of language and the need for authoritativecommunities of interpreters, critiques that appear prescient today despite the conventional caricatureof common law lawyers as antimodern formalists.
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