BiblioVault - Books by Nelson, William

Americanization of the Common Law

The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760-1830

William E. Nelson

Harvard University Press

Enlightenment Biopolitics

A History of Race, Eugenics, and the Making of Citizens

William Max Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 2024

A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath.

In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals.

In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and “organize” the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed “improvement of the human species” and practices of dehumanization.

[more]

The Fourteenth Amendment

From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine

William E. Nelson

Harvard University Press, 1988

In a remarkably fresh and historically grounded reinterpretation of the American Constitution, William Nelson argues that the fourteenth amendment was written to affirm the general public’s long-standing rhetorical commitment to the principles of equality and individual rights on the one hand, and to the principle of local self-rule on the other.

[more]

Handbook for Rural Health Care Ethics

A Practical Guide for Professionals

Edited by William A. Nelson

Dartmouth College Press, 2010

The rural community presents not only distinct health care delivery challenges but also ethical problems for clinicians and administrators of small, rural health care facilities. Health care delivered in a rural context—in closely knit, tightly interdependent small community settings—poses unique ethical considerations for clinical practitioners. For example, a provider in a resource-poor rural setting may be faced with treating a family member, friend, business associate, or neighbor, since the role separation between clinician and patient that predominates in the urban setting is less likely to occur in a small town. Because of the unique rural context, the solutions that health care providers develop to resolve complex ethics dilemmas may differ from solutions reached in urban areas. The Handbook for Rural Health Care Ethics is designed to be a useful resource for clinicians and administrators in rural settings. It draws on the available research and real-life examples to paint a picture of challenging, yet all-too-familiar ethics conflicts while offering strategies for a proactive, preventive approach to ethical issues.

[more]

The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900

William E. Nelson

Harvard University Press, 1982

William Nelson reinterprets nineteenth-century American history as a struggle between majority rule and minority rights. From this fresh point of view, he traces the roots of American bureaucracy.

Nelson analyzes the majority–minority tension form the Jacksonian revolution of strong party rule and majoritarian decisionmaking through the abolitionist crisis, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the rise of industrialism. He shows that ultimately political and legal pluralism emerged to protect minority and individual rights. The instrument of a professional bureaucracy with neutral political standards was fashioned. Personalities as seemingly disparate as Henry Adams, John W. Burgess, Charles W. Eliot, Christopher Columbus Langdell, and Theodore Roosevelt all contributed in an effort to stop the centralizing impact of democracy.

Nelson’s new way of thinking about the period puts into different perspective the actions of the three branches of federal government, its courts and administrative agencies, and even the states. All shifted toward bureaucratic or neutral standards, reliance on experts, and professionalization. Legal thought changed from an instrumental to a formal reasoning style, civil service tamped down partisan politics, and in Congress, seniority and the committee system check democratic tendencies.

[more]

Transformations in American Legal History

Daniel W. Hamilton

Harvard University Press

Over the course of his career at Harvard, Morton Horwitz changed the questions legal historians ask. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (1977) disclosed the many ways that judge-made law favored commercial and property interests and remade law to promote economic growth. The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (1992) continued that project, with a focus on ideas that reshaped law as we struggled for objective and neutral legal responses to our country’s crises. In more recent years he has written extensively on the legal realists and the Warren Court.

Following an earlier festschrift volume by his former students, this volume includes essays by Horwitz’s colleagues at Harvard and those from across the academy, as well as his students. These essays assess specific themes in Horwitz’s work, from the antebellum era to the Warren Court, from jurisprudence to the influence of economics on judicial doctrine. The essays are, like Horwitz, provocative and original as they continue his transformation of American legal history.

[more]