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The definitive biography of the statesman who helped shape Alabama and the American frontier.

A biography of Alabama’s first Senator, this book is also the fascinating story of Southern frontier life as portrayed in contemporary letters and documents. When Madison County, Alabama, was still wilderness, Walker trekked across the mountains from Georgia with his bride, Matilda Pope, his slaves, and all his household possessions, to build a plantation near Huntsville. Here he began his extraordinary political career: member of the first territorial legislature; speaker of the house in the second; U.S. territorial judge; president of Alabama’s Constitutional Convention; and when statehood was won, first U.S. Senator.

Though his term in the Senate was cut short by illness, resignation, and death, in the four years he served, he met head-on the most controversial issues of his day—the Missouri Compromise, acquisition of Florida, and land relief legislation. It was in land relief that he made his most significant contribution, for he fathered the 1821 Land Law upon which new public-lands legislation for a decade thereafter was based. His own state wildly acclaimed him upon its passage; other frontier states had good reason to make him the public hero he became. But a year later, at 40, he was dead of tuberculosis.

 

This is the first complete English translation of Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York by Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. It presents the rich reflections and tales of an 18th-century Frenchman who lived and traveled in America for 27 years. Soldier-of-fortune, gentleman farmer, friend of Washington and Franklin, Crèvecoeur describes his natural surroundings with a charm and delight unrivaled by any writer but Thoreau. In this book we follow two men, a narrator and his friend, as they witness unfamiliar Native American rituals and visit frontier settlements along the Hudson River. Interwoven are fanciful impressions of the Indigenous communities of the region and sagas of adventure that stretch credibility. More than a straightforward narrative of travel, the book has the ideological goal of attacking the corruption of Old World civilization and contrasting it with a vision of harmony, abundance, and democracy resulting from the American revolution. The work has not previously been translated into English. 

Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights. 
 
Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office. 
 
Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth. 
 
Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy. 
 

From its inception in 1816 until 2010, 105 Hoosiers have been members of the Indiana Supreme Court. In this multiauthor volume, edited by Linda C. Gugin and James E. St. Clair, authors explore the lives of each justice, unearthing not only standard biographical information but also personal stories that offer additional insight into their lives and times.