Charles McCurdy

Charles McCurdy

Professor of Law and History in the Corcoran Department of History, University of Virginia

April 3, 2014 — 4:10 PM
Toll Room, Alumni House — UC Berkeley Campus

Add to Google Calendar 04/03/2014 4:10 PM 04/03/2014 6:00 PM America/Los_Angeles The First U.S. ‘War on Terror’: The 1798 Sedition Act and Constitutional Politics in the Age of Jefferson

About the Lecture This lecture will consider how the Founding Fathers dealt with the unanticipated emergence of hotly contested, increasingly political interpretations of the Constitution during the first decade of the Early Republic and also how they responded to fact … Continued

Toll Room, Alumni House - UC Berkeley Campus Berkeley Graduate Lectures [email protected] false MM/DD/YYYY

About the Lecture

This lecture will consider how the Founding Fathers dealt with the unanticipated emergence of hotly contested, increasingly political interpretations of the Constitution during the first decade of the Early Republic and also how they responded to fact that constitutional change had occurred through interpretation rather than through constitutional amendment.

About Charles McCurdy

Professor McCurdy is a historian whose research has explored the sources and effects of legal change in United States history. His studies have examined the ways in which ideology, economic changes and political movements have affected the development of legal institutions. McCurdy’s 2001 book, The Anti- Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, l839-65, illuminated the ways that these social forces shaped patterns of violence in the drive for land reform during the largest tenant rebellion in United States history. Exhaustively researched and richly detailed, the work offered a major reinterpretation of ideas and institutions, which, he argued, diminished the promise of American democracy in the supposed “golden age” of American law and politics.  McCurdy has also written path-breaking articles and book chapters on anti-trust law, the regulation of property rights, the history of “freedom of contract,” and the development of federalism and legal thought in modern America.


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