Books by John Fabian Witt

A concise history of how American law has shaped-and been shaped by-the experience of contagion

Ranging from the founding era to Reconstruction, from the making of the modern state to its post-New Deal limits, Witt illuminates the legal and constitutional foundations of American nationhood through the stories of five patriots and critics., each of whom came up against the power of national institutions to shape the directions of legal change.

Witt argues that experiments in accident law at the turn of the 20th century arose out of competing views of the loose network of ideas and institutions that historians call the ideology of free labor. These experiments a century ago shaped 20th- and 21st-century American accident law and laid the foundations of the American administrative state.