Tocqueville and the Legal Culture of Jacksonian America

This article reconstructs the influence of American lawyers on Tocqueville's thought. By placing Tocqueville's well-known reflections on the role of lawyers in American democracy in the context of the 1820s-30s debates about the trial by jury and the issue of codification, and shedding light over the underexplored thought of one of Tocqueville's mains sources, Edward Livingston of Louisiana, the article advances a new interpretation of Democracy in America's considerations about the legal spirit and the dialectics between judicial institutions and democratic society.