Legal Publishing in Antebellum America

Abstract

Legal Publishing in Antebellum America presents a history of the law book publishing and distribution industry in the United States. Part business history, part legal history, part history of information diffusion, M. H. Hoeflich shows how various developments in printing and bookbinding, the introduction of railroads, and the expansion of mail service contributed to the growth of the industry from an essentially local industry to a national industry. Furthermore, the book ties the spread of a particular approach to law, that is, the 'scientific approach', championed by Northeastern American jurists to the growth of law publishing and law book selling and shows that the two were critically intertwined.

Dark Energy

“…To constrain dark energy by using the SNIa data, the absolute magnitude of SNIa must be determined first. Since the detailed mechanism of SNIa explosions remains uncertain, [319] SNIa are not intrinsically standard candles, with a 1σ spread of order 0.3 mag in peak B-band luminosity. [320] Fortunately, in 1992 Phillips found that SNIa has a clear correlation between their intrinsic brightness at maximum light and the duration of their light curve.…”

The Politics of Libel: Thomas Erskine, Freedom of the Press, and Transatlantic Legal Culture, c. 1780–1830

“…The publication, distribution, and sale of law books evolved as "one of the principal ancillary support and communication networks" which, as Hoeflich demonstrates, "combined to make the development of American law and the American legal profession possible." 104 The relative speed of uptake and dissemination of Erskine's legal work, alongside that of other English lawyers and legal scholars, was therefore shaped by the conditions of the book trade as well as changes in American legal practice and demand from lawyers. Impressive sales of Blackstone's Commentaries in the 1770s encouraged the importation of more legal texts and the trade in law books grew steadily, until by 1800 three-quarters of all law booksellers' stock was imported from London or Dublin.…”

“…105 By the 1820s the number of American imprints of English law books had grown substantially, but many of these, including legal treatises on libel, had additional notes of American cases which increased their utility to lawyers needing to adapt the application of common law in different states. 106 Lawyers' libraries contained copies of Erskine's more famous speeches in pamphlet form soon after they were delivered in the 1780s and 1790s and many lesser known cases in the form of Law Reports covering the court of King's Bench where he was the leading practitioner. 107 It was not until the early nineteenth century that his defenses of key libel cases appeared in libel treatises in America.…”