Outposts of the Law: The Frontier and the Civil-Law Fringe

This chapter discusses the history of American frontier law. The new nation faced the problem of how to deal with the western lands. Some of the states had huge, vague, and vast claims to chunks of western land, stretching out far beyond the pale of settlement; other states did not. The Ordinance of 1787 dealt with the issue of governance and the future of the western lands. It set basic law for a huge area of forest and plain that became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Ordinance of 1790 extended the influence of the Northwest Ordinance into what became the state of Tennessee.