Selected Documents Relating to Law Reform in North Carolina During the Nineteenth Century: With Numerous Documents from Surrounding Centuries to Provide Historical Context

This compilation offers excerpts from 174 documents that tell the story of law reform in North Carolina during the nineteenth century. The work opens with a few dozen documents of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which raise recurring themes in law reform in the state, such as the distrust of attorneys per se and of judges in the exercise of their discretion, as well as the commitment to the writtenness of laws. The heart of the work is found in its next two parts, which cover the state’s Antebellum Period and its Code Commission Era in the nineteenth century. The documents in these parts of the book focus on the interplay of the case law gradually being developed by the state’s supreme court and the statute law gradually being imposed by the legislature, rather than on specific reform initiatives in court administration or substantive law. Important points in this technical story are the passage of The Revised Statutes of the State of North Carolina in 1837 and adoption of The Code of Civil Procedure of North Carolina in 1868. The work closes with excerpts from documents in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which record opinions on such topics as whether the state should codify its common law. Among the excerpted documents, the reader will find letters, newspaper articles, speeches, biographical vignettes, government reports, constitutions, legislative materials, supreme court opinions, legal commentary, and prefaces and introductions from a variety of legal sources.

Thomas P. Davis has worked in the law library of the Supreme Court of North Carolina since 1994, serving as librarian since 1999. He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University School of Law and has been licensed to practice law in North Carolina since 1992. He lives in Cary, North Carolina.

James Barrett Fish, a native of Willow Spring, North Carolina, has worked in the law library of the Supreme Court of North Carolina since 1999, serving as assistant librarian for public services since 2005. He earned an undergraduate degree in history at North Carolina State University and a master’s degree in library science from North Carolina Central University.