“Every Cord that Binds together the People to the Government”: Local Magistracy and the Making of an Adjudicatory State in Early New York

Abstract

Abstract: Focusing on early New York, this essay suggests that local magistracy was a contentious but foundational site of state formation in early America. Throughout an extended period of legal reform and partisan state-building spanning the mid-eighteenth to early-nineteenth centuries, state authorities struggled to grapple with the autonomy of on-the-ground local governance centered on justices of the peace. By the early nineteenth century, however, it became increasingly clear that controlling the appointment of justices and directly disciplining them were ineffectual and politically unfeasible means of curbing local autonomy. Ultimately it was the state supreme court that provided the cornerstone for central authority’s influence on local governance, by gradually shaping a stable jurisprudence of local governance through careful and selective exercise of its appellate power. The resulting formulation was what may be described as an adjudicatory state, in which state power expressed itself less through direct coercion than by inducing officials and inhabitants to conduct matters of local governance within the bounds of a statewide judicial framework.