Gregg Crane is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University. He has been a member of the State Bar of California since 1986. He has published in American Literary History, American Literature, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly.

'A profound and moving book that deserves a wide audience. Crane displays a searching wisdom and precise imagination in brilliantly describing the moral universe where literature and law meet in key texts of the nineteenth century. An indispensable study of nationalism and race and their impact on American law and literature.' Eric Sundquist

• Acknowledgments; Introduction; 1. Higher law in the 1850s; 2. The look of higher law: Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery fiction; 3. Cosmopolitan constitutionalism: Emerson and Douglass; 4. The positivist alternative; 5. Charles Chesnutt and Moorfield Storey: citizenship and the flux of contract.