Railroads and American Law

Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2001. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. ix, [1], 365, [9] pages. Frontis illustrations. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. List of Cases Cited. Subject Index. DJ has tears, chips, and creases at the back. James W. Ely Jr. is the Milton R. Underwood Professor of Law Emeritus and Professor of History Emeritus at Vanderbilt University. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia and his L.L.B. from Harvard University. Ely is a property rights expert, a legal historian, and an author and editor of several books that have received critical acclaim from legal scholars and historians. Since joining the faculty of Vanderbilt University in 1972, he has been recognized by students as one of the law schools' outstanding teachers. In 2006, Ely received the Brigham-Kanner Property Rights Prize, given to a scholar whose work has advanced the cause of property rights and has contributed to the awareness of the role property rights occupy in terms of individual liberty. James W. Ely Jr., in the first comprehensive legal history of the rail industry, shows that the two institutions the railroad and American law had a profound influence on each other. Railroads, the first major industry to experience extensive regulation, brought about significant legal innovations governing interstate commerce, eminent domain, private property, labor relations, and much more. Much of this development was originally designed to serve the interests of the railroads themselves but gradually came to contest and control the industry's power and exploitative tendencies. The railroad was not universally admired. Railroads uprooted people, threatened local autonomy, and posed dangers to employees and the public alike situations with unprecedented legal ramifications. Ely explores the complex and sometimes contradictory ways in which those ramifications played out, as railroads crossed state lines and knitted together a diverse nation with thousands of miles of iron rail. "Railroads and American Law" makes a complex subject accessible to a wide range of readers.