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Although Americans claim to revere the Constitution, relatively few understand its workings. Its real importance for the average citizen is as an enduring reminder of the moral vision that shaped the nation's founding. Yet scholars have paid little attention to the broader appeal that constitutional idealism has always made to the American imagination through publications and films.Maxwell Bloomfield draws upon such neglected sources to illustrate the way in which media coverage contributes to major constitutional change. Successive generations have sought to reaffirm a sense of national identity and purpose by appealing to constitutional norms, defined on an official level by law and government. Public support, however, may depend more on messages delivered by the popular media. Muckraking novels, such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906), debated federal economic regulation. Woman suffrage organizations produced films to counteract the harmful gender stereotypes of early comedies. Arguments over the enforcement of black civil rights in the Civil Rights Cases and Plessy v. Ferguson took on new meaning when dramatized in popular novels. From the founding to the present, Americans have been taught that even radical changes may be achieved through orderly constitutional procedures. How both elite and marginalized groups in American society reaffirmed and communicated this faith in the first three decades of the twentieth century is the central theme of this book. ; https://scholarship.law.edu/fac_books/1049/thumbnail.jpg

Until quite recently the judiciary—and the federal judiciary in particular—has been largely neglected by American novelists and playwrights. Literary historians such as Joseph Blotner and Gordon Milne, who have studied the American political novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, have found an abundance of works dealing with legislative or executive skullduggery, but only a handful of titles that examine issues of judicial power. Such relative disinterest in our noblesse de robe seems easily explainable. Judges have always been less visible to the public than, say, Congressmen or Governors, and the business of judging does not lend itself readily to dramatization.

As the twentieth century approached, bar leaders increasingly complained that the open bar, like the open range, had outlived its usefulness. In 1899 the Texas Bar Association began a vigorous lobbying effort for more restrictive regulation of attorneys. The state legislature responded four years later with a bill that required all future bar candidates to take a standardized written examination.The results of this new approach were immediate and gratifying to those who clamored for a more exclusive profession. While approximately four hundred candidates had applied for, and obtained, a license between August 1, 1896, and August 1, 1897, only ninety applicants took the new written tests during the first year they were administered, and sixteen of these failed."The bar regulations of 1903 signaled the end of a frontier-oriented professionalism in Texas, just as the simultaneous discovery of oil at Spindletop ended the state's long history of economic subservience to other regions. In an age of increasing affluence, urbanism, and professional bureaucratization, there was as little sympathy for the "prairie-dog lawyer" as there was for the buffalo.But the rural practitioners of the nineteenth century deserve better treatment from historians. Serious attention to their collective careers cannot fail to enhance our knowledge of regional folkways and of the role of law in reshaping the material environment of a restless and acquisitive people.

In recent years scholars have paid increasing attention to the concept of "republicanism" as a measure of cultural change in America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To the Revolutionary generation republicanism connoted most obviously a representative form of government, based upon popular sovereignty and limited in its powers by a written constitution. But republican ideology encompassed far more than the restructuring of political institutions. It called for a regenerated society as well, in which men should be encouraged to pursue their individual destinies with a minimum of interference from public authorities. Civic morality and self-determination were closely linked in republican thought, and the theme of a virtuous and productive citizenry permeated much of the literature and art of the new nation.

In the folklore of American legal history the middle decades of the nineteenth century mark the nadir of professionalism in national life. While acknowledging the brilliant achievements of individual practitioners and judges during the years from 1830 to 1870, commentators from Charles Warren and Roscoe Pound to W. Raymond Blackard and Anton-Hermann Chroust have insisted upon the overall deterioration of the bar under the assaults of a militant democracy. The standard picture of professional development in the United States begins with a Golden Age of jurisprudence in the early Republic, fostered by a self-regulating fraternity of educated judges and lawyers. Then come the Barbarian Invasions, as the semi-literate masses force their way into legal practice, aided by sympathetic state legislatures. Finally, after several decades of disorder and demoralization, an elite leadership arises to purge the profession of its populist standards of recruitment and achievement, through the creation of the first modern bar associations in the eighteen-seventies. In its broad outlines this pattern of alternating light and shadow appeals strongly to the imagination, while providing at least a plausible account of the interplay between legal groups and the forces of social change. But the closer one scrutinizes the thesis, the less satisfactory do its major assumptions appear.

The advent of Jacksonian democracy in American politics coincided with a vigorous leveling movement in American law. In one sense the latter crusade was nothing new: hostility toward the elitism of the legal fraternity had been rife since the days of the Revolution. But whereas earlier critics had worked to simplify the content of the law, reformers in the 1830's and 1840's attacked the problem from a different angle. Eschewing substantive changes, they sought instead to bring the administrators of the law under more direct popular control. Their program embraced a wide range of legislative measures in which worried conservatives read portents of mob rule.

The transition from colony to nation involved difficult readjustments in the thinking and behavioral patterns of the American people, and nowhere were the inherent tensions more evident than in the field of law. Prior to the revolution, Americans had willingly accepted the legal principles and practices of the mother country, although modifying them somewhat to suit the more fluid social and economic environment of the New World. But the achievement of political independence from England soon led to demands that all other ties with the former metropolis be severed as well. Radical agitators in various states thus urged the complete abandonment of the common law during the years from 1783 to 1815. Generally their attacks were motivated by political considerations, becoming more virulent with the rise of the French-oriented Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson. Twisting the British lion's tail in matters legal proved a popular vote-getting device in the early nineteenth century, and alarmed conservatives feared the successful subversion of all law and order.

The first fourteen years of the twentieth century constituted a major reform period in American history. In politics, economics and the arts new ideas and practices emerged to shatter nineteenth-century pre- conceptions. Crusading journalists led the way in calling for a revitalized democracy to bridge the dangerous gulf separating the very rich from the very poor. Increasingly public opinion was directed toward the elimination of class barriers by absorbing laborer and capitalist, immigrant and old-stock native, into an expanded form of democratic state which should minister to the welfare of all. Yet during these same years, when mass audiences responded to the idealism of class solidarity and human brotherhood, relations between Negroes and whites in America grew more embittered and violent. By 1909 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had been organized to combat a mounting wave of race riots and lynchings in both North and South. What caused this upsurge of racial intolerance in an otherwise reform-minded era? A study of the most popular anti-Negro propagandist in pre-World War I America suggests that middle-class liberalism was by no means incompatible with attacks on allegedly "inferior" racial groups

THEY CALL IT JUSTICE: COMMAND INFLUENCE AND THE COURT-MARTIAL SYSTEM. By Luther C. West. New York: The Viking Press, 1977. Pp.xii, 302. $12.95. Reviewed by Daniel H. Benson In his book West is dealing with a subject that is difficult to discuss without generating hostility, misunderstanding, and, occasionally, incredulity. He is attacking the classic military understanding of the basic purpose of the court-martial system. He asks the reader to accept his word and assurances concerning the accuracy of the problems he describes, over the assurances of the military justice establishment that all is well. In doing all of this, West joins the ranks of a small but constantly growing group of individuals who have had the courage and the persistence to tell the unvarnished truth about the realities of the court-martial system. His work as a maverick within the system is not entirely without precedent in the history of American military justice, and one of the most valuable aspects of his book is its brief summary of the work of the early reformers and of the battles they had to fight in order to be heard. ======================== THE TRANSFORMATION OF AMERICAN LAW, 1780-1860. By Morton J.Horwitz. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press,1977. Pp. xvii, 356. $16.50. "This study attempts to challenge certain features of the'consensus' history that has continued to dominate American historiography since the Second World War," observes Morton Horwitz in his introduction.' Specifically, Horwitz charges that historians sympathetic to the New Deal have been too uncritical in their assessments of earlier instances of governmental economic regulation.Eager to disprove the theory of an unbroken laissez-faire tradition,such figures as Louis Hartz and Oscar and Mary Handlin discovered in the early nineteenth century a pattern of governmental activism that seemed to them responsive to the needs of society at large. In fact, Horwitz argues, an interventionist legal policy grew out of conditions of "social struggle" in ...

Wheat is a major food crop, with around 765 million tonnes produced globally. The largest wheat producers include the European Union, China, India, Russia, United States, Canada, Pakistan, Australia, Ukraine and Argentina. Cultivation of wheat across such diverse global environments with variation in climate, biotic and abiotic stresses, requires cultivars adapted to a range of growing conditions. One intrinsic way that wheat achieves adaptation is through variation in phenology (seasonal timing of the lifecycle) and related traits (e.g., those affecting plant architecture). It is important to understand the genes that underlie this variation, and how they interact with each other, other traits and the growing environment. This review summarises the current understanding of phenology and developmental traits that adapt wheat to different environments. Examples are provided to illustrate how different combinations of alleles can facilitate breeding of wheat varieties with optimal crop performance for different growing regions or farming systems.