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A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights. By Laura F. Edwards. New Histories of American Law. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 212. Paper, $29.99, ISBN 978-1-10740134-1; cloth, $80.00, ISBN 978-1-107-00879-3.)
In A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction: A Nation of Rights, Laura F. Edwards analyzes the legal transformations in rights brought about by the national experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction. She argues that this experience remade both individual rights and the federal government, linking individual rights to broader conceptions of social justice and raising the question of how responsible the federal government would be for defining and enforcing individual rights. While the answer reached by the end of the nineteenth century was pretty clearly "not much," the question itself would later fuel the American rights revolution of the mid- to late twentieth century aptly analyzed by Charles R. Epp and others.
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