Prof. Laura Edwards talk at VCU, Wed., Nov. 7, at 5pm in the Commons Theater:

My talk, "The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture in the Post-Revolutionary South," explores the importance of localism, an underappreciated, but crucial element of the legal system in the post-Revolutionary South.  During and after the Revolution, southern states created decentralized governing structures that placed a great deal of authority in local areas.  In those localities, most of that public business was conducted in local courts.  This local legal system operated according to a logic designed to protect community order, not the rights of individuals.  It preserved "the peace," a well-established Anglo-American legal concept that subordinated everyone-from the highest to the lowest-to the public order as it was defined through customary practices in particular local areas.  Because the system depended on the knowledge and information of people in those local areas, ordinary people, rather than legal professionals or written legal documents, were central to this system.  Even those without rights participated in it, because the system protected established custom, not individual rights.  At the time, this system was seen as the realization of the Revolution, which promised to put governing power in the hands of the people.  It was also vilified by political leaders who saw localism as a source of instability and who wished to create stronger, more centralized states.  By the 1830s, those state leaders across the South had secured support for a their vision of government, which demanded the subordination of local legal venues to a unified body of state law.  The emphasis on these emerging government structures-by both state leaders and later scholars-has obscured an important, vibrant legacy of the Revolution.  This talk will reconstruct that lost world, one that continues to inform our legal system today even though its place in our past has been largely forgotten.

For more information, please contact Carolyn Eastman at [log in to unmask]<blocked::mailto:[log in to unmask]>, or (804) 828-0053.


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