Introduction to American Law. Designed as a First Book for Students

Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1895. 10th ed. "The Western Blackstone" Walker, Timothy. Bates, Clement, Editor. Introduction to American Law. Designed as a First Book for Students. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1895. xxvi, 867 pp. Octavo (9-1/4" x 6-1/4"; 23.5 x 15.9 cm). Contemporary law calf, blind frames to boards, raised bands and red and black lettering pieces to spine, blind tooling to board edges. Light rubbing to boards, moderate rubbing to extremities with some wear to spine and corners, front hinge cracked, owner signature (M. Siegel) to front pastedown, offsetting and a few minor chips to margins of preliminaries and final few leaves. A very good copy. $450. * Tenth edition, the penultimate edition of this work. This foundational text in nineteenth-century American legal education is based on lectures delivered by Walker (1802-1856) during his tenure as a law professor at Cincinnati College, an institution he co-founded with Judge John C. Wright in 1833 as the first law school west of the Appalachian Mountains. Often referred to by legal historians as the "Western Blackstone," Walker's work distilled complex common law principles into an accessible framework specifically tailored to the emerging American legal system. First published in 1837, the text's exceptional clarity and systematic layout ensured its dominance in classrooms for over half a century. Julius J. Marke notes that the work "for many years was used as a textbook for American law students." The tenth edition, revised by the notable Ohio legal scholar Clement Bates, underscores the text's enduring longevity and its critical adaptation to the post-Civil War legal landscape. The eleventh and final edition was published in 1905. Marke, Catalogue of the Law Collection at New York University (1953) 250.…