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Negotiable Instruments and the Federal Courts in Antebellum American Business*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Tony A. Freyer
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of History, University of Arkansas, Little Rock

Abstract

That human needs and social realities are the roots of all systems of jurisprudence is nowhere more demonstrable than in the evolution of the law of business. Professor Freyer shows that neither the English common law of negotiable instruments nor the modifications made in it in the colonial era were adequate in the lusty, far-flung, and rapidly growing young nation that the Constitution of the United States created. Innovation, he reveals, promptly followed.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1976

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References

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14 See notes 36–42.

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38 16 Wend. 659 (1837).

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58 2 Wheaton 75.

59 Ibid., 72.

60 Ibid., 75.

61 Ibid., 73.

62 Townsley v. Sumrall, 2 Peters 182 (1829).

63 16 Peters 1 (1842); for a discussion of antecedents and the decision itself in its business and legal context see Freyer, “Unity from Diversity,” 1–173.

64 Swift v. Tyson, 16 Peters 18 (1842).

65 Ibid., 20.

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