Family service: Labor, the family and legal reform in the United States

The dissertation analyzes the development of American political institutions in the context of statutory reform of the marriage law between 1838 and 1919. Employing legal treatises, case law, statutes, contemporary commentaries and secondary accounts of reform, the work illuminates significant aspects of American legal and political development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dissertation supplements the existing scholarly understanding of the period by showing that the judiciary functioned as regulators in the area of community law; that American law embodied a mixture of individualist and hierarchical principles; that the common law exerted a powerful, nationalizing influence on community law; that judicial activism appeared in the form of statutory construction well before the constitutional battles of the Lochner era; that the marital relation was a species of labor relation; and that marriage law underwent a transition from common law to a mixture of statutory and common law governance as a result of legislative reform efforts.