Heart versus head

Challenging traditional accounts of the development of American private law, Peter Karsten offers an important new perspective on the making of the rules of common law and equity in nineteenth-century courts.

The central story of that era, he finds, was a struggle between a jurisprudence of the head, which adhered strongly to English precedent, and a jurisprudence of the heart, a humane concern for the rights of parties rendered weak by inequitable rules and a willingness to create exceptions or altogether new rules on their behalf.

Karsten unites his legal commentary with recent scholarship on the political culture of antebellum America in exploring the roots of a pro-plaintiff, humanitarian jurisprudence. In the process, he necessarily addresses the shortcomings of earlier, economic-oriented paradigms regarding judicial rulemaking in the nineteenth century - an alleged jurisprudence of the visible or invisible hand - demonstrating that both head and heart guided the making of American common law.