How did Americans imagine law as they sought to establish their own independent sovereignty? This book is about the forging of new conceptions of legalism between the beginning of the Seven Years' War in 1756 and the period of the French Revolution in the 1790s. To tell this story properly means focusing on the intersection of criminal law, politics, and language. Criminal law – not the abstraction of constitutional principles – was often the locus of debates about justice. Its captivating tales from the underworld, its setting into stark relief fundamental issues of proper conduct, and its reliance upon the violence of punishment made it the most talked-about legalism in late-eighteenth-century America's coffee houses and cobblestone streets. Politics was intertwined with law in Revolutionary America. Legal arguments and narratives provided a cultural network for galvanizing a population stretched out along the Atlantic seaboard and westward. The rituals of punishment, such as hanging in effigy, became the rituals of rebellion.

Popular law talk was at the heart of revolutionary law-making and at the heart of the American Revolution itself. It assumed many guises and served many purposes, including the legitimation of resistance against the British, establishing a link between street ritual and print culture, acting as an instrument of political mobilization, and mere entertainment. Historians have uncovered a burgeoning public sphere for political discourse in the end of the eighteenth century across the Atlantic world. This arena is often associated with meeting places such as taverns or new forms of conviviality.