Of "Good Laws" and "Good Men"

William Offutt, Jr., places legal processes at the center of this regions social history. The new societies established there in the late 1600s did not rely on religious conformity, culture, or a simple majority to develop successfully, Offutt maintains. Rather, they succeeded because of the implementation of reforms that gave the expanding population faith in the legitimacy of legal processes implemented by a Quaker elite. Offutt's painstaking investigation of the records of more than 2,000 civil and 1,100 criminal cases in four county courts over a thirty-year period shows that Quakers--the "Good Men"--were disproportionately represented as justices, officers, and jurors in this system of "Good Laws"  they had established, and that they fared better than did the rest of the population in dealing with it.
 

William M. Offutt, Jr. is an associate professor of history at Pace University, New York.