"This book explores how Americans adjusted their economic behavior to new market incentives that resulted from the American Revolution. Jonathan Chu explores individual economic and legal behaviors, connecting them to adjustments in trade relations with Europe and Asia, the rise in debt...

In an 1873 decision, the Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote--highly unusual in those days--upheld a bribery-procured Louisiana slaughterhouse monopoly that had been challenged by a group of butchers whose businesses were jeopardized. By that decision (called the Slaughter-House cases), one of the most...