A Law Unto Itself? Essays in the New Louisiana Legal History

Abstract

Unto Itself: Essays in the Louisiana Legal Edited by Warren M. Billings and Mark F. Fernandez. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv, 224. $34.95.) The editors intend the interrogative in Unto Itself? as an opening challenge to the convention that nineteenth-century Louisiana jurisprudence lay outside southern and American mainstreams. They mean to showcase, in an introduction and nine essays, a genre that Warren Billings has named New Louisiana Legal History. Mark Fernandez's introduction outlines what seems a brilliant organizational scheme. Part one, Books and the Law, suggests a study of lawyer mentalite; part two, Judges and Courts, implies an analysis of the legal establishment at work; and part three, Law and Society, explores the force of law on the larger culture. Unto Itself? reveals the new Louisiana legal history as a fertile field of inquiry. However, the book does not live up to structural ambitions, and its essays amplify the title's ambivalence by engaging only sporadically with the unifying theme of evaluating Louisiana legal history in larger context. Several contributions leave the impression that Louisiana jurists excused themselves from questions that had burning force nationally. Focused chiefly on the era stretching from the Louisiana Purchase to the Civil War, the essays underplay sectional tensions, the revolution in commercial law, and southern anxiety over federal power as shapers of state jurisprudence. In A Course of Legal Studies, Warren M. Billings describes readings mandated for prospective lawyers by the supreme court of Louisiana in 1840. He does not investigate how the court meant law students to reconcile James Kent's nationalistic Commentaries on American with Thomas Cooper's states' rights editorializing in his Institutes of Justinian. One also wonders how the court and new practitioners of law reacted to William Blackstone's refutation of slavery in the Commentaries on the Laws of England. Antebellum instructors of law, from Joseph Story at Harvard, to Beverley Tucker at William and Mary, to Cooper at the College of South Carolina, used such works as weapons in fierce ideological warfare with sectional counterparts. Given the intent of Unto Itself?, readers need more information on how Louisiana jurists fit into the national fray and how they may have employed key legal texts to defend state prerogatives, legitimize a unique code noir, and justify secession. The three essays in part one identify a body of law-related literature but do little to gauge its influence. Essays examining the creation and operation of Louisiana's courts between 1803 and 1865 succeed better at analyzing state justice within an American legal tradition, but they also leave perplexing questions. …