Intellectual Origins of the State Police Power: The Common Law Vision of a Well-Regulated Society

• NCJ Number: 120861
• Author(s): W J Novak
• Date Published: 1989
• Length: 112 pages
• Sale Source: University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: Legal History Program, working papers series 3

Annotation

This paper explores the legal and intellectual backdrop to the emergence of State regulatory power (police power) in the early nineteenth century.

Abstract

Assertions are made that the traditional categories used to interpret legal change in this period, such as, constitutionalism, liberalism, and instrumentalism, have blinded us to an extraordinary legal and political discourse that imposes antebellum legal decisions on private rights and public regulations. This concept has been labeled "the common law vision of a well-regulated society." It focuses on man as a social being in society on the pragmatic, historical, methodology that is enshrined in a dynamic, pre-Enlightenment conception of the common law, and with the overall concern that the public happiness be determined through a well-regulated society. (Author abstract modified)