From loss of services to loss of support: The wrongful death statutes, the origins of modern tort law, and the making of the nineteenth-century family

Law and Social Inquiry

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 717-755

  Witt, John Fabian ^a,b  

^a U States Ct Appeals Second Circuit ^*  (United States)

^b YALE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0034411384     PISSN: 08976546     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-4469.2000.tb00159.x     Document Type: Article

References (134)

1. Ashworth, John. 1992. The Relationship Between Capitalism and Humanitarianism. In The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
2. Bardaglio, Peter W. 1995. Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
3. Basch, Norma. 1982. In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
4. Bergstrom, Randolph E. 1992. Courting Danger: Injury and Law in New York City, 1870-1910. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
5. Blackmar, Elizabeth. 1989. Manhattan For Rent, 1785-1850. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
6. Blackstone, William. 1765-69. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
7. Blewett, Mary H. 1988. Men, Women, and Work: Class, Gender, and Protest in the New England Shoe Industry, 1780-1910. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
8. Boydston, Jeanne. 1990. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early American Republic. New York: Oxford University Press.
9. Chamallas, Martha. 1998. The Architecture of Bias: Deep Structures in Tort Law. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 146:463-531.
10. Chused, Richard. 1983. Married Women's Property Law: 1800-1850. Georgetown Law Journal 71:1359-425.
11. Clark, Christopher. 1990. The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780-1860. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
12. Cott, Nancy F. 1977. The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
13. _. 1998. Marriage and Women's Citizenship in the United States, 1830-1934. American Historical Review 103:1440-74.
14. Cott, Nancy F., and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds. 1979. A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women. New York: Simon and Schuster.
15. Dalzell, Robert F. Jr. 1987. Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
16. Dawley, Alan. 1976. Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
17. Dayton, Cornelia Hughes. 1995. Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
18. Death Under the Civil Damage Act. 1879. Albany Law Journal 20:204-5.
19. Dubler, Ariela R. 1998. Governing Through Contract: Common Law Marriage in the Nineteenth Century. Yale Law Journal 107:1885-920.
20. _. Forthcoming. Wifely Behavior: A Legal History of Acting Married. Columbia Law Review.
21. Dublin, Thomas. 1979. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York: Columbia University Press.
22. Edwards, Laura F. 1997. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
23. Epstein, Richard A. 1982. The Historical Origins and Economic Structure of Workers' Compensation Law. Georgia Law Review 16:775-819.
24. _. 2000. Cases and Materials on Torts. 7th ed. Gaithersburg, Md.: Aspen Law and Business.
25. Faler, Paul G. 1981. Mechanics and Manufacturers in the Early Industrial Revolution: Lynn, Massachusetts 1780-1860. Albany: State University of New York Press.
26. Fineman, Martha L. A. 1995. Masking Dependency: The Political Role of Family Rhetoric. Virginia Law Review 81:2181-215.
27. Finkelman, Paul. 1987. Slaves as Fellow Servants: Ideology, Law, and Industrialization. American Journal of Legal History 31:269-305.
28. Foner, Eric. 1970. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.
29. _. 1983. Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
30. Fox, Mary Frank, and Sharlene Hesse-Biber. 1984. Women at Work. Palo Alto, Calif.: Mayfield Publishing.
31. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. 1988. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
32. Franklin, Benjamin. 1962. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. New York: Macmillan.
33. Friedman, Lawrence M. 1985. A History of American Law. 2d ed. New York: Simon and Schuster.
34. _. 1987. Civil Wrongs: Personal Injury Law in the Late 19th Century. American Bar Foundation Research Journal 1987:351-78.
35. Friedman, Lawrence M., and Thomas D. Russell. 1990. More Civil Wrongs: Personal Injury Litigation, 1901-1910. American Journal of Legal History 34:295-314.
36. Oilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1898. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Women and Men. Boston: Small, Maynard.
37. Goldin, Claudia. 1990. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. New York: Oxford University Press.
38. Gordon, Linda. 1993. Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935. New York: Free Press.
39. Gordon, Robert W. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57-125.
40. Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quinton Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers.
41. Gregory, Charles O. 1951. Trespass to Negligence to Absolute Liability. Virginia Law Review 37:359-97.
42. Grossberg, Michael. 1985. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
43. Harper, Fowler V., Fleming James Jr., and Oscar S. Gray. 1986. The Law of Torts. 2d ed. Boston: Little, Brown.
44. Hartog, Hendrik. 1993. Abigail Bailey's Coverture: Law in a Married Woman's Consciousness. In Law and Everyday Life, ed. Austin and Thomas R. Kearns. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
45. _. 2000. Man and Wife in America: A History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
46. Hawkins, Francis Vaughan. 1885. Concise Treatise on the Construction of Wills. 2d Am. ed. Philadelphia: T. and J. W. Johnson.
47. Hensler, Deborah R., et al. 1991. Compensation for Accidental Injuries in the United States. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Institute for Civil Justice.
48. Hoffman, Frederick. 1915. Industrial Accident Statistics. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Bulletin 157:17-210.
49. Holdsworth, W. S. 1916. The Origins of the Rule in Baker v. Bolton. Law Quarterly Review 32:431-37.
50. _. 1923. A History of English Law. Vol. 3. London: Methuen.
51. Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr. 1881. The Common Law. Boston: Little, Brown.
52. Hunter, Tera. 1997. To 'Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
53. Johnson, Paul E. 1978. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. New York: Hill and Wang.
54. Jones, Gareth H. 1958. Per Quod Servitium Amisit. Law Quarterly Review 74:39-58.
55. Kakalik, James S., and Nicholas M. Pace. 1986. Costs and Compensation Paid in Tort Litigation. Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Institute for Civil Justice.
56. Karlsen, Carol F. 1987. The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England. New York: Norton.
57. Karsten, Peter. 1997 Head Versus Heart: Judge-Made Law in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
58. Kerber, Linda. 1980. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture.
59. _. 1988. Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History. Journal of American History 75:9-39.
60. Kessler-Harris, Alice. 1982. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
61. _. 1995. Designing Women and Old Fools: The Construction of the Social Security Amendments of 1939. In U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda Kerber et al. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
62. King, Lester S. 1991. Transformations in American Medicine: From Benjamin Rush to William Osler. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
63. Larson, Jane E. 1993. "Women Understand So Little, They Call My Good Nature Deceit": A Feminist Rethinking of Seduction. Columbia Law Review 93:374-472.
64. Laurie, Bruce. 1980. Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
65. Lebsock, Suzanne. 1984. The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860. New York: Norton.
66. Legislature of New York. 1847a. Albany Argus, 5 December, p. 2.
67. _. 1847b. Albany Argus, 11 December, p. 2.
68. _. 1847c. Albany Argus, 12 December, p. 2.
69. Lerner, Gerda. 1969. The Lady and The Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800-1840. In Cott and Pleck 1979.
70. Lewis, Jan. 1987. The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic. William and Mary Quarterly 44:689-721.
71. Litwack, Leon F. 1979. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Knopf.
72. Malone, Wex S. 1965a. The Genesis of Wrongful Death. Stanford Law Review 17:1043-76.
73. _. 1965b. American Fatal Accident Statutes - Part I: The Legislative Birth Pains. Duke Law Journal 1965:673-719.
74. McCurdy, William E. 1930. Torts Between Persons in Domestic Relation. Harvard Law Review 43:1030-82.
75. McCurry, Stephanie. 1995. Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. New York: Oxford University Press.
76. Mink, Gwendolyn. 1995. The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
77. Minow, Martha. 1985. Forming Under Everything that Grows: Toward a History of Family Law. Wisconsin Law Review 1985:819-98.
78. Montgomery, David. 1967. Beyond Equality: Labor and the Rodical Republicans, 1862-1872. New York: Knopf.
79. _. 1993. Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press.
80. Morris, Thomas D. 1996. Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
81. Murphy, Teresa Anne. 1992. Ten Hours' Labor: Religion, Reform, and Gender in Early New England. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
82. Nelson, Barbara J. 1990. The Origins of the Two-Channel Welfare State: Workmen's Compensation and Mothers' Aid. In Women, The State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
83. Nelson, William E. 1996. Patriarchy or Equality: Family Values or Individuality. St. John's Law Review 70:435-538.
84. Note. 1986. Slavery and the Fellow Servant Rule: An Antebellum Dilemma. New York University Law Review 61:1112-48.
85. Pateman, Carol. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
86. _. 1989. The Patriarchal Welfare State. In The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Carol Pateman. Cambridge: Polity.
87. Pleck, Elizabeth H. 1979. A Mothers' Wages: Income Earning Among Married Italian and Black Women, 1896-1911. In Cott and Pleck 1979.
88. Prude, Jonathan. 1983. The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860. New York: Cambridge University Press.
89. Rabin, Robert L. 1981. The Historical Development of the Fault Principle: A Reinterpretation. Georgia Law Review 15: 925-61.
90. Reagan, Leslie J. 1997. When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
91. Reeve, Tapping. 1816. The Law of Baron and Femme; of Parent and Child; of Guardian and Ward; of Master and Servant; and of the Powers of Courts of Chancery. New Haven, Conn.: Oliver Steele.
92. Reid, John Phillip. 1980. Law for the Elephant: Property and Social Behavior on the Overland Trail. San Marino, Calif.: Henry E. Huntington Library.
93. Rock, Howard B. 1979. Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson. New York: New York University Press.
94. Rosen, George. 1983. The Structure of American Medical Practice 1875-1941, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
95. Rosenberg, Charles E. 1987. The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America's Hospital System. New York: Basic Books.
96. Russell, Thomas D. 1999. Solace and Recompense in Tum-of-the-Century Streetcar Deaths. Paper presented at the Law and Society Association Annual Meeting, 28 May 1999. http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~russell.
97. _. 2000. Blood on the Tracks: Turn of the Century Streetcar Injuries, Claims, and Litigation in Alameda County, California, http:llccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~russell/pubs/ bott.html.
98. Ryan, Mary P. 1981. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865. New York: Cambridge University Press.
99. Salmon, Marylynn. 1986. Women and the Law of Property in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
100. Saville, Julie. 1994. The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870. New York: Cambridge University Press.
101. Schlanger, Margo. 1998. Injured Women Before Common Law Courts, 1860-1930. Harvard Women's Law Journal 21:79-140.
102. Schwartz, Gary T. 1981. Tort Law and the Economy in the Nineteenth Century: A Reappraisal. Yale Law Journal 90:1717-75.
103. _. 1989. The Character of Early American Tort Law. UCLA Law Review 36:641-718.
104. Shearman, Thomas G., and Amasa A. Redfield. 1869. A Treatise on the Law of Negligence. New York: Baker, Voorhis.
105. Shelton, Cynthia J. 1986. The Mills of Manayunk: Industrialization and Social Conflict in the Philadelphia Region, 1787-1837. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
106. Siegel, Reva B. 1992. Reasoning from the Body. Stanford Law Review 44:261-381.
107. _. 1994a. Home as Work: The First Women's Rights Claims Concerning Wives' Household Labor. Yale Law Journal 103:1073-217.
108. _. 1994b. The Modernization of Marital Status Law: Adjudicating Women's Rights to Earnings, 1860-1930. Georgetown Law Journal 82:2127-211.
109. _. 1996. The Rule of Love. Yale Law Journal 105:2117-207.
110. Silverman, Robert A. 1981. Law and Urban Growth: Civil Litigation in the Boston Trial Courts, 1880-1900. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
111. Simpson, A. W. B. 1996. Leading Cases in the Common Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
112. Sklar, Kathryn Kish. 1973. Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
113. Skocpol, Theda. 1992. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
114. Stanley, Amy Dru. 1996. Home Life and the Morality of the Market. In The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
115. _. 1998. From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
116. Stansell, Christine. 1982. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860. New York: Knopf.
117. Steinfeld, Robert J. 1991. The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
118. Stevenson, Brenda E. 1996. Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. New York: Oxford University Press.
119. Thompson, Seymour D. 1886. The Law of Negligence in Relations Not Resting in Contract. San Francisco: Bancroft-Whitney.
120. Tiffany, Francis B. 1893. Death By Wrongful Act: A Treatise on the Law Peculiar to Actions for Injuries Resulting in Death. St. Paul, Minn.: West.
121. Tomlins, Christopher L. 1993. Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic. New York: Cambridge University Press.
122. Tushnet, Mark V. 1981. The American Law of Slavery: Considerations of Humanity and Interest. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
123. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. 1982. Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750. New York: Knopf.
124. _. 1990. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Knopf.
125. Vandervelde, Lea. 1996. The Legal Ways of Seduction. Stanford Law Review 48:817-901.
126. Wallace, Anthony F.C. 1978. Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution. New York: Knopf.
127. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
128. Welke, Barbara Y. 1994. Unreasonable Women: Gender and the Law of Accidental Injury, 1870- 1920. Law and Social Inquiry 19:369-403.
129. Welter, Barbara. 1966. The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860. American Quarterly 17:151-74.
130. Wilentz, Sean. 1984. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850. New York: Oxford University Press.
131. Witt, John Fabian. 1998. The Transformation of Work and the Law of Workplace Accidents, 1842-1910. Yale Law Journal 107:1417-502.
132. _. Forthcoming a. Rethinking the Nineteenth-Century Employment Contract, Again. Law and History Review.
133. _. Forthcoming b. Toward a New History of American Accident Law - The Case of the Cooperative First-Party Insurance Movement. Harvard Law Review.
134. Zelizer, Viviana A. 1985. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. New York: Basic Books.