Wisconsin and the Shaping of American Law

Joseph A. Ranney, a practicing attorney and legal scholar, uses the Wisconsin Supreme Court as a vantage point to chart historical patterns of law in the American states. The result is a welcome survey of policy actions in the states, which have always constituted a central artery of governance in the United States. In twelve chapters arranged thematically and chronologically, Ranney reviews English precedents of American law, frontier, and Jacksonian jurisprudence in the period before statehood, and then examines conflicts over fugitive slaves, railroads, ethnic-cultural disputes, and resources industries during the late nineteenth century. Chapters on the twentieth century focus on progressivism, the New Deal, civil rights, changes in commercial law, and a concluding chapter on “expressive individualism” that includes gay rights, guns, school choice, and abortion. The author emphasizes Wisconsin's influence on other states, particularly concerning fugitive slaves, railroad regulation, progressive reform, unemployment compensation, and more recently, school vouchers. His examination of judicial decisions and legislation in and among the states, combined with summaries of national constitutional history, provides contexts to assess Wisconsin's legal actions. This comparative focus, which pivots horizontally across states and vertically between the states and federal constitutional developments, gives the book a creative design, as well as a huge research agenda. The result is reported in slightly over two hundred pages of text and seventy pages of notes that emphasize cases, state session laws, and law review articles

American exceptionalism · Common law · Constitutional law · Jurisprudence · Legal history · Legislation · Political science · Politics · Progressivism · Sociology · State (computer science · Supreme court · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies