Why read Jefferson's Louisiana?

Book cover of Jefferson's Louisiana: Politics and the Clash of Legal Traditions

Book description

The Purchase of all of Louisiana in 1803 brought the new American nation into contact with the French Creole population of the Lower Mississippi Basin. The Spanish called it Baja Luisiana. While the settlement in and around the city of New Orleans (the capital of the province when it was…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Jefferson's Louisiana as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Joseph A. Ranney

Author

Jefferson's Louisiana is an absorbing study of a clash of cultures that helped to shape America's legal empire as it moved westward. Louisiana, governed by Spain and France under civil law codes for nearly a century before it became part of the United States, was a crossroads at which English law (dominant elsewhere in the new nation) and European law collided. Prof. Dargo first describes the uneasy cultural accommodation that French and Spanish settlers made with American immigrants at the turn of the nineteenth century, an accommodation made more challenging by Aaron Burr's simultaneous efforts to foment revolution in…

From Joseph's list on The best books to understand the role that states have played in shaping American law and legal history.