Repressive Jurisprudence in the Early American Republic

Phillip Blumberg is Dean and Professor Emeritus at University of Connecticut School of Law. After two decades of law practice on Wall Street and leadership as the CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed financial corporation, he turned to legal scholarship. He is the country's leading authority on corporate groups and the author of path-breaking books including The Multinational Challenge to Corporation Law and the five-volume treatise Blumberg on Corporate Groups (2nd edition). Six years ago, he became interested in early American jurisprudence; this volume is the result.

1. Political and jurisprudential worlds in conflict in the new Republic; 2. Politics in the new Republic; 3. Seditious and criminal libel in the colonies, the states, and the early Republic during the Washington administration; 4. Federalist partisan use of seditious libel - statutory and common; 5. Seditious and criminal libel during the Jefferson and Madison administrations 1800–16; 6. Partisan prosecutions for seditious and criminal libel in the state courts: federalists against republicans, republicans against federalists, and republicans against dissident republicans in struggles for party control; 7. Established jurisprudential doctrines (other than seditious and criminal libel) available in the new Republic for suppression of anti-establishment speech; 8. Still other nineteenth-century doctrines for suppression of anti-establishment speech: the law of blasphemy and the slave-state anti-abolition statutes; 9. Conclusion.