"There were two principal aims of this casebook when it first appeared 32 years ago. The first aim, recognizing the sad fact that most undergraduates and law students in America are woefully uninformed about general U.S. history, was for us to try to give them a basic outline, including the English background of the common law the struggle between the Hamiltonian Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans in the Early Republic, the commercial expansion of the country in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, the Warren Court Era, and the current struggle beƯ tween the advocates of a living constitution and the proponents of original understanding ... We have tried to craft a book that can be used either in undergraduate or law school courses, but, as a second special aim for the law students, we made an attempt to suggest that the basic doctrines studied in the first year of law school (contracts, torts, property, business organizations) have common themes and are linked as reflections of political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural developments in American society". -- PREFACE.