From Tavern to Courthouse: Architecture & Ritual in American Law, 1658-1860 (review)

McNamara links the rise of the sense of place, ritual, and architectural presence to the objectives of two rising professional elites. The author's investigations play upon the pioneering insights of Miller, who argued that the law nudged aside religion as the primary liturgical expression of a new nation.¹ Unlike Miller, who found the law's primacy prior to the Revolution, McNamara's evidence suggests that the decisive triumph occurred in the last decades of the eighteenth century, even though the upsurge in litigation that marked it made lawyers uneasy about their self-professed destiny as the elect of the new nation.²

As Tocqueville guessed, lawyers would manage the affairs of a fractious republic as self-anointed aristocrats. How they managed to convince fellow citizens to go along with such unrepresentative plans has never been entirely clear. McNamara guesses that in the Massachusetts context, Puritan antipathy to sacral space may have provided a wedge of entry, finally moving the courts out of meetinghouses as well as taverns (20–22). Her title is odd since her evidence suggests that the full courts met in the meetinghouses and that only individual justices heard small cases in the ordinaries.

McNamara reminds us that the lawyers had help in their quest from the professionalization of architecture, which allowed architects, also aspirants to social and political status, to "present themselves as separate from common builders—a definition that rested on abstractions such as 'taste'" (83). She concentrates on the "housing" of courts in buildings of tasteful permanence, tracing a process of specialization in both the function and design of buildings dedicated to the law. This task is all the more difficult because of the relatively few surviving examples of these courthouses. McNamara documents the shift during the last decades of the century when the buildings found new homes at a distance from commercial town centers. The complexities of a commercial society allowed the profession to convince a hostile and skeptical public of its expertise in navigating economic and social relations and conflicts (46–53).

Generously illustrated, McNamara's study provides concrete examples of her argument. Documenting the growing "refinement" of urban landscapes, she demonstrates the emergence of legal liturgies, the carefully scripted performances wherein professionals dominated sanctuaries buffered from the very commercial activity that financed taste and the new landscapes (75–79). Libraries, critical resources for lawyers, also attracted architects, as did subscription libraries, monuments to expert knowledge confined to privileged social and intellectual elites (90–94).

An epilogue illustrating unhappiness with courts and lawyers facing abolition and fugitive slave laws is too brief to be any more than a hint at future troubles. But McNamara's explication of legal and architectural change, adroitly employing the history of professionalization, rituals, landscapes, and the law, deserves a wide readership.