Explore the controversial legal history of the formation of the United States Prestatehood Legal Materials is your one-stop guide to the history and development of law in the U.S. and the change from territory to statehood. Unprecedented in its coverage of territorial government, this book identifies a wide range of available resources from each state to reveal the underlying legal principles that helped form the United States. In this unique publication, a state expert compiles each chapter using his or her own style, culminating in a diverse sourcebook that is interesting as well as informative. In Prestatehood Legal Materials, you will find bibliographies, references, and discussion on a varied list of source materials, including: state codes drafted by Congress county, state, and national archives journals and digests state and federal reports, citations, surveys, and studies books, manuscripts, papers, speeches, and theses town and city records and documents Web sites to help your search for more information and more Prestatehood Legal Materials provides you with brief overviews of state histories from colonization to acceptance into the United States. In this book, you will see how foreign countries controlled the laws of these territories and how these states eventually broke away to govern themselves. The text also covers the legal issues with Native Americans, inter-state and the Mexico and Canadian borders, and the development of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of state government. This guide focuses on materials that are readily available to historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and researchers. Resources that assist in locating not-so-easily accessible materials are also covered. Special sections focus on the legal resources of colonial New York City and Washington, DC—which is still technically in its prestatehood stage. Due to the enormity of this project, the editor of Prestatehood Legal Materials created a Web page where updates, corrections, additions and more will be posted.

Table of contents available via the World Wide Web.

A reference guide to Oregon that includes information about the state's history, geography, politics, state services, historic landmarks, and constitution.

Which branch of government should be entrusted with safeguarding individual rights? Conventional wisdom assigns this responsibility to the courts, on the grounds that liberty can only be protected through judicial interpretation of bills of rights. In fact it is difficult for many people even to conceive of any other way that rights might be protected. John Dinan challenges this understanding by tracing and evaluating the different methods that have been used to protect rights in the United States from the founding until the present era. By examining legislative statutes, judicial decisions, convention proceedings, and popular initiatives in four representative states-Massachusetts, Virginia, Michigan, and Oregon-Dinan shows that rights have been secured in the American polity in three principal ways. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rights were protected primarily through representative institutions. Then in the early twentieth century, citizens began to turn to direct democratic institutions to secure their rights. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that judges came to be seen as the chief protectors of liberties. By analyzing the relative ability of legislators, citizens, and judges to serve as guardians of rights, Dinan's study demonstrates that each is capable of securing certain rights in certain situations. Elected representatives are generally capable of protecting most rights, but popular initiatives provide an effective mechanism for securing rights in the face of legislative intransigence, and judicial decisions offer a superior means of protecting liberties in crisis times. Accordingly, rather than viewing rights protection as the peculiar province of any single institution, this task ought to be considered the proper responsibility of all these institutions. By undertaking a comparison of these institutional methods across such a wide expanse of time, Keeping the People's Liberties makes a highly original contribution to the literature on rights protection and provides a new perspective on debates about the contemporary role of representative, populist, and judicial institutions.