From: Yale Law Journal | Date: December 1, 1997| Author: Scheiber, Harry N. | COPYRIGHT 1997 Yale University, School of Law. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan.  All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group.Copyright information

By William J. Novak. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. x, 396. $55.00 (hardcover), $19.95(paper).

"Productivity was the central test and validating canon."(1) Thus did the late Willard Hurst, our leading historian of nineteenth-century law, characterize the criterion by which, from the 1830s to the 1870s, Wisconsin "confidently wielded authority over the waterways"(2) of the lumbering region that formed so vital a part of its economy. In thi...