This is their story, set against the wider narrative of the writing of America's history. It may be, as Flaubert put it, that "Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times.

Historian Peter Charles Hoffer reexamines a notorious episode in American history and presents many of its legal details in true perspective for the first time.

In Litigation Nation, Peter Charles Hoffer, one of America’s most preeminent legal historians, charts the history of civil litigation from the seventeenth century to the present, using key cases pursued by ordinary people to illustrate ...

This text retells the dramatic story of these landmark trials.

Uncivil Warriors is an expansive and authoritative account of the central role of law and lawyers in the Civil War.

Reading Law Forward looks at seven judges who exemplify this alternative jurisprudence: John Marshall, Joseph Story, Lemuel Shaw, Louis D. Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, William O. Douglas, and Stephen G. Breyer. “In the hands of America’s ...

Daniel Webster and the Unfinished Constitution reveals Webster as the foremost constitutional lawyer of his day.

But, even more importantly, this is a story of the courts' development and their vital part in America's history.

In Seward's Law, Peter Charles Hoffer argues that William H. Seward's legal practice in Auburn, New York, informed his theory of relational rights—a theory that demonstrated how the country could end slavery and establish a practical form ...

While they have been studied as political theory, these writings and speeches are rarely viewed as the work of active lawyers, despite the fact that key protagonists in the story of American independence were members of the bar with ...