Courts and Commerce in Colonial New York

Abstract

Law is always shaped to some extent by economic factors. Contrary to the implications of some legal historians,' this was nothing new in the nineteenth century. In fact, the American legal system underwent steady change in response to economic developments well before the alleged modernization in the nineteenth century. During the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, America passed from a basically agrarian to a commercial and then to an industrial society. At the same time, the law adapted to the interests and concerns of a landed elite in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, a commercial elite during the rest of the eighteenth century, and then an industrial elite in the nineteenth century. Because the law was responding to a changing economy and a changing elite, it should be no surprise that the law changed. This article focuses on the adaptation of the New York legal system to economic developments of the eighteenth century. The significance of legal adaptations of the eighteenth century is often not recognized by historians for two reasons. First, they are often ignored because the eighteenth century adaptations were of a different nature than the changes of the nineteenth century. Specifically, in the nineteenth century the substance of the law changed in response to economic developments while in the eighteenth century legal practice changed. Procedure and practice are not neutral, just as the substance of contract and tort law are not neutral. Different forms of legal practice support and further different economic structures and interests. Therefore, changes in legal practice are just as significant as changes in substantive law.