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eBook
Seward's Law
2023
Overview
In Seward's Law
, Peter Charles Hoffer argues that William H. Seward's
legal practice in Auburn, New York, informed his theory of
relational rights-a theory that demonstrated how the country could
end slavery and establish a practical form of justice.
This theory, Hoffer demonstrates, had ties to Seward's career as a
country lawyer. Despite his rise to prominence, and indeed
preeminence, as a US secretary of state, Seward's country-lawyer
mentality endured throughout his life, as evinced in his personal
attitudes and professional conduct. Relational rights, identified
and termed here for the first time by Hoffer, are communal and
reciprocal, what everyone owed to every other member of their
community. Such rights are at the center of a jurisprudential
outlook that arises directly from living in a village. Though
Seward was limited by the Victorian mores and the racialist
presumptions of his day, the concept of relational rights that
animated him was the natural antithesis to the theories and
practices of slavery. In the legal regime underpinning the
institution, masters owed nothing to their bondmen and women, while
those enslaved unconditionally owed life and labor to their
masters. The irrepressible conflict was, for Seward,
jurisprudential as well as moral and political. Hoffer's leading
assumption in Seward's Law is that a lifetime spent as a
lawyer influences how a person responds to everyday challenges.
Seward remained a country lawyer at heart, and that fact defined
the course of his political career.
Publisher
Cornell University Press
Subject
ISBN
9781501767333, 150176733X, 1501767356, 9781501767357
