The Early Republic, 1790s–1870s

Abstract

This chapter looks at sources of information about American law during the 1790s–1870s. To “create” a body of law, most states passed “reception statutes,” which generally allowed English law as of a certain date to be considered a part of the state's laws. Even with the reception statutes, however, not a lot of law was yet made in many of the states or in the United States as a whole. Therefore, for several decades, U.S. court decisions continued to rely on English law. In considering nineteenth-century sources, a researcher should keep in mind that legal publishing was not very advanced, even in the largest of the new states. As the court systems developed, a system for case reporting took shape but remained a nongovernmental activity until into the nineteenth century. Other sources of information include case files, court journals, court dockets, session law publications, and private laws.