Out of the American Revolution emerged a newfound legal culture grounded upon imaginative visions of criminal justice. Creating legal rhetoric tied to popular politics, the use of law as an instrument of political mobilization, the fabrication of legal language and symbolism accessible to the common people, the demand for the transparency of criminal law process, seeing criminal law as the mirror of society, and the recasting of statutes away from sanguinary punishment marks a notable departure from existing early-eighteenth-century Anglo-American conceptions of criminal law.

Most legal histories of America's foundational period have engaged in an archeology of knowledge that has yielded a past remarkably consonant with our present. The search has been for our official legal ancestry – in statutory material transplanted from England, common-law norms, and the rulings of courts. Yet it is often the plethora of unofficial responses to law at all levels of society that formed the backbone of late-eighteenth-century American legal culture. An explosion of law talk in the form of print and ritual was simultaneously used to communicate legal decision-making, ignite political mobilization, and mock both the powerful and the powerless. It made law the lingua franca of late-eighteenth-century America.

We are so used to mining the past for its genealogical beginnings – such as the origins of various rights or even the kernel of legal procedures – that we have failed to realize that perhaps the most significant feature of American legalism of the period was how it read law in an intertextual fashion.