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  • City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago
  • Barbara Y. Welke
City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago. By Michael Willrich (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003) 332 pp. $70.00cloth $25.00paper

City of Courts is interdisciplinary history at its best; its audience includes American historians, legal scholars, and criminal-justice public-policy experts. The focus is deceptively simple and local, an apparent moment in time—the creation and elaboration of the municipal court system in Progressive Era Chicago. Yet, what Willrich does with this topic offers a lesson in the scope of local, institutional, and legal history. The Municipal Court of Chicago, established in 1906, was the first modern, metropolitan court system. It was the product of a series of factors, ranging from explosive urban growth and the influx of immigrants; to the birth of social science with its embrace of expertise; and to the growing belief among social reformers and leading jurists that individuals were not solely responsible for their actions and that society bore at least some of the burden for crime. Chicago's Municipal Court became the model [End Page 292] that cities across the nation followed. Its significance was palpable: For the vast majority of Chicagoans, the Municipal Court was the face of justice.

Willrich's argument is divided into an elegant three-part structure. In Part I ("Transformation"), he provides a fascinating, nitty-gritty glimpse into the workings of the justice of the peace courts and traces the intellectual and institutional journey that led to their replacement by the Municipal Court of Chicago. In Part II ("Practices"), Willrich explores the legal and social rationale for, and the workings of, four of the specialized courts—the court of domestic relations, the morals court, the boys' court, and the psychopathic laboratory. In Part III ("Misgivings"), he traces the challenge that America's first "War on Crime" in the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s presented to socialized justice.

Willrich's sources are concentrated in, although not limited to, Chicago, including the rich and previously unmined records of the Municipal Court itself; the papers and scrapbooks of Judge Harry Olson, the chief justice of the court from 1906 to 1930; the proceedings and reports of a multitude of Progressive Era commissions and associations; and the published and unpublished writings of leading jurists, including, most importantly, Roscoe Pound, and social reformers. The primary subjects in the work are the judges, legal scholars, social reformers, and elected officials who theorized, orchestrated, and implemented a system of socialized justice in Chicago during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Less prominent, are those who found themselves before the court or otherwise became caught up in its complex web of experts.

In the preface and the afterword, Willrich treats the larger significance of the reform of municipal court systems across the nation during the Progressive Era, making three important points: first, that tracing the roots of modern state formation requires looking at the local, not the federal, level; second, that legal institutions' preeminence as sites of social governance increased, not withered, at the turn of the twentieth century; and, third, that at the core of socialized justice rested a paradox: Liberation of individuals from the burden of autonomous guilt paved the way for greater incursions against liberty by the state. Willrich's unique contribution—and what makes his work essential reading for those interested in state formation, law, and liberty—is his recognition and careful elaboration of the central role played by the municipal court system, its judges, and the elaborate web of experts that served them in their attempt to address the ills of society through the criminal-justice system. In the afterword, Willrich brings the strands of this complex narrative together to pose a series of penetrating questions about the relationship among bureaucracy, individual liberty, social justice, and the law that Americans engaged seriously for the first time in Chicago's great experiment but that remains at the heart of our legal system today.

Barbara Y. Welke
University of Minnesota
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