Introduction

We are fortunate to present in this issue a retrospective of William Novak’s book The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. The essays published here were presented originally as a panel at the Policy History Conference in Nashville in June 2016, entitled “The People’s Welfare at 20: William J. Novak’s Pioneering History of the Early American State.” Publishing these essays affords us an opportunity to assess not only the impact of an important book two decades in to its existence, but also the state of a field. Legal history is a becoming a vibrant field of both history and law, and Novak’s book has played an important role in that development. The People’s Welfare is not an easy book to penetrate initially. It is more conceptual than the traditional history monograph, and its largely synchronic approach is sometimes off-putting to historians looking for change over time. I will admit that when I first read the book as a graduate student, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. By my third-year, however, it was beginning to make sense. I now use it to frame my introductory law school course on property law, and its development of the idea of police and the police power is always somewhere in my mind in both my teaching and scholarship.

Legal history · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Publishing · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Welfare · Welfare state · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law