Legal History

This Essay concerns the evolving relationship between the economy and the methods society deployed to legitimate, control, and channel economic behavior, especially religion and law. Using the recently published work of three eminent academics—Benjamin Friedman, Jonathan Levy, and William Novak—it addresses first the changes in thought necessary to legitimate acquisitive economic behavior and the consequent centering of law as the secular replacement for religion. As capitalism fostered wider markets, as its evolution embodied industrialism and commercialism, it created problems that the regulatory state could not handle. In America, the transition from regulatory to administrative state was complicated by its federal structure and background democratic egalitarian yearnings. Friedman, Levy, and Novak illustrate and elucidate aspects of that evolution. This Essay suggests that reading them together explains more than each separately, and ends by noting how the tensions they explain usefully add to our understanding of American law, and, coincidentally, the potentially transformational administrative law decisions of the Supreme Court in the 2023–2024 term.

The Supreme Court did not use the term “federalism” in any opinions in its first 150 years. The Court had (of course) previously talked about federal-state relations, but it did so without the term “federalism”—it preferred a different vocabulary, discussing the police powers of the states and the enumerated powers of the federal government.

In asserting that “this land is our land” in his new book by that title,1 Professor Jedediah Purdy hopes to craft a narrative of possibility and common plight that can serve as a banner high and wide enough for all to unite beneath. The task he undertakes in this meditative collection of essays, written in a colloquial and often poetic tone, is no less than to sketch out a “horizon to aim for”—for all to aim for—a vision of the future to guide the kind of legal, social, and political change he wishes to see.