Blackstone in America
Selected Essays of Kathryn Preyer

Blackstone in America explores the creative process of transplantation - the way in which American legislators and judges refashioned the English common law inheritance to fit the republican political culture of the new nation. With current scholarship returning to focus on the transformation of Anglo-American law to 'American' law, Professor Kathryn Preyer's lifelong study of the constitutional and legal culture of the early American republic has acquired new relevance and a wider audience. The collection includes Professor Preyer's work on criminal law, the early national judiciary, and the history of the book. All nine of Professor Preyer's important and award-winning essays are easily accessible in this volume, with new introductions by three leading scholars of early American law.

1. Introduction Stanley N. Katz; Part I. Law and Politics in the Early Republic: 2. Introduction Maeva Marcus; 3. Federalist policy and the Judiciary Act of 1801; 4. The appointment of Chief Justice Marshall; 5. The midnight judges; 6. US v. Callender: judge and jury in a republican society; Part II. The Law of Crimes in Post-Revolutionary America: 7. Introduction Kent Newmyer; 8. Penal measures in the American colonies: an overview; 9. Crime, the criminal law and reform in post-revolutionary Virginia; 10. Jurisdiction to punish: authority, federalism and the common law of crimes in the early republic; Part III. The History of the Book and Trans-Atlantic Connections: 11. Introduction Mary Sarah Bilder; 12. Beccaria and the founding fathers; 13. Two enlightened criminal law reformers: Thomas Jefferson of Virginia and Peter Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Mary Sarah Bilder is currently a Professor at Boston College Law School. She is the author of The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and Empire, which won the Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society, awarded by the American Historical Association. She also serves on the editorial boards of Law and History Review, Journal of Legal Education, and New England Quarterly.
Maeva Marcus is currently Director of the Institute for Constitutional Studies and a Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. She is the author of Truman and the Steel Seizure Case and an editor of The Documentary History of the Supreme Court of the United States, 1789–1800 (8 volumes), as well as an editor of and contributor to Origins of the Federal Judiciary: Essays on the Judiciary Act of 1789 and a member of the Permanent Committee for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise.
R. Kent Newmyer is currently Professor of Law and History at the University of Connecticut Law School and a Distinguished Alumni Professor, emeritus, at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Justice Joseph Story: Statesman of the Old Republic (1985), which won the Littleton-Griswold Prize in American Law and Society, awarded by the American Historical Association, as well as the Silver Gavel Award, awarded by the American Bar Association for the Supreme Court. He also wrote John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (2001), which received the Francis Landry Award from Louisiana State University Press, in addition to an award from the State Library of Virginia for the best non-fiction book of the year.