| The court of chancery was an extraordinary remedy, an option when no other legal recourse was available. Beginning in the Northwest Territory, I explore chancery's growing authority as a metropolitan model for US governance through the 1940s. I focus on Chicago's Cook County chancery, a leading national center for judicial innovation, interrelating the court's coevolution in American territories. Inverting conventional narratives of chancery's nineteenth-century demise, I underscore its importance for reconstructing property ownership, regulating labor, adjudicating differential legal rights, guiding the soul, and incorporating---or segregating---strangers. This is the first extended historical analysis of chancery as a US state or territorial jurisdiction. Chancery or equity---the terms are used synonymously---is a juryless court in which judges can rule according to the dictates of conscience rather than the law's letter. Better known as an English court, chancery has a more cosmopolitan history as the machinery of governance for the medieval papacy and American empires. Implicating faith as a dynamic force in state development, I sound the resonance of chancery's religious heritage for those who would bring the spirit of Christ into the government. Turning the tables on studies of US hegemony abroad, I trace the blowback from colonial administration in the metropole, probing the urban utility of a colonial court. I build on path-breaking scholarship establishing Chicago's courts as national models for twentieth-century governance, illuminating the shadow jurisdiction that underwrote the city's vaunted juvenile and municipal courts. Finally, I explore the paradox inherent in the American embrace of equitable justice. Anathema as a papal and imperial jurisdiction, chancery has facilitated the dispossession of indigenous land, enforcement of involuntary servitude, criminalization of labor strikes, denial of due process protections, coercive social governance, investigations of heterodox religions, and the enforcement of racial and religious covenants that segregated urban communities. Yet many of those who fell under the court's aegis---including slaves, Indians, women, labor activists, and blacks---found its remedies crucial for their own vision of social justice. By 1940, equity procedure predominated in American civil courts and underwrote key civil and human rights deliberations, most famously in Brown v. Board of Education. |
