James Kent, Joseph Story and the Quest for Authoritative Reasoning

Daniel Hulsebosch (NYU) has posted to NELLCO, Debating the Transformation of American Law: James Kent, Joseph Story, and the Legacy of the Revolution. In the essay, he demonstrates that although Kent and Joseph Story agreed about the desirability of a strong Congress, an independent federal judiciary, and the need to control juries, they disagreed about the shape of each of these institutions. Together, these disagreements reveal not only the dynamism of American law in the early Republic but also illuminate the indeterminacy of federal authority and the judicial power. In addition, their disagreements illustrate the quest for authoritative reasoning that defined post-revolutionary American legal culture and the intertextuality of its formative literature. [JH]