A Reevaluation of the New York Court of Appeals: The Home, the Market, and Labor, 1885-1905
Felice Batlan,
Felice Batlan
Felice Batlan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at New York University and an attorney.
Search for more papers by this authorFelice Batlan,
Felice Batlan
Felice Batlan is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at New York University and an attorney.
Search for more papers by this authorFor their knowledge, time, and encouragement, my heartfelt gratitude to William E. Nelson, Thomas Bender, Linda Gordon, Richard B. Bernstein, Martha Hodes, and the participants at the NYU Legal History Colloquium. This article is part of a larger project that explores gender, the police power, and the politics of reform in tum-of-the-century New York.
Abstract
Closely examining a range of New York Court of Appeals police-power cases during the period 1885 to 1905, this article demonstrates that the New York Court had a long history of accepting and continually expanding the police power. In these police-power cases, one finds the court grappling with an evolving sense of how to balance the concept of and need for a well-regulated society against the rights of an individual in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, as well as a tenacious refusal to abandon Victorian bourgeois norms regarding the dichotomy between the home and workplace. By contextualizing and historicizing New York Court of Appeals cases, the article challenges the dominant historiographical interpretations about late-nineteenth-century law. Moving away from a paradigm that labels the court conservative or liberal, formalist or realist, it argues that the court participated in creating a regulatory state while also employing a reasoning that adopted a sharp distinction between the market and the site of the domestic.
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