The least understood aspect of the punishment of crime in pre-nineteenth-century Spanish society is trial procedure. This is not surprising. Our misapprehensions and misinterpretations of the past are principally the product of eighteenth-century reality being sieved through an uncritical acceptance of nineteenth-century political criticism. The West inherits much of its modern paradigm from the Spain of 1808 to 1834, from Romantic images of Goya as the enlightened individual fighting obscurantism to portrayals of heroic guerrilla patriots seeking to wrest political reform from a reactionary central government. It also inherits, although less consciously, the political rubrics of liberal and conservative (and absolutist) from nationalist polemics during the 1808–1814 French occupation. When looking back half a century later, Spaniards wanted to distinguish themselves clearly from the past.

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had surprisingly little impact on women's citizenship or the American constitutional order. For seventy-two years, from 1848 until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, suffrage was the central demand of the woman rights movement in the United States. Women demanded the right to vote in the nineteenth century because they believed it would make them first class citizens with all the rights and privileges of other first class citizens. Both normatively and instrumentally, the suffragists believed that voting would secure equal citizenship for women by raising their civic status and allowing them to assert their political interests. Yet in many ways women were more politically efficacious in the years just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment than they were afterward. Further, their ability to claim rights from the courts and legislatures, on the basis of their new status as voting citizens, was limited.

Even today, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949) strikes students of constitutional law as a vexing factual situation. The problems the case posed for the High Court are all the more daunting considering its historical context, directly following the nation's confrontation with Nazism and standing on the cusp of the Cold War against Communism. In the broader view, most observers would locate the decision within the ascendance of liberal protection for free speech rights occurring over the second half of the twentieth century. But progressive accounts should not be allowed to mask the contemporary momentousness for the justices hearing the case. Indeed, in this constitutional conflict over the speech of a rabble-rousing priest was lodged a sober question about the polity's health at that time and the preferred response to the nation's need.

Progressive legal scholars from the 1930s through the 1960s sought to explain why the Supreme Court had set itself in such bald opposition to the concurrent branches of the federal government. The Court seemed profoundly committed, even to the point of risking its very existence, to an ideology that, in Justice Holmes's famously understated phrase, “a large part of the country d[id] not entertain.” What had led to the union between jurisprudence and conservative reaction?

When James Coolidge Carter died at age seventy-seven in 1905, a front page article in the New York Times declared, “It was admitted everywhere that he possessed one of the most thoroughly equipped legal minds which this country ever produced.” His friend Congressman William Bourke Cockran eulogized him on the floor of the United States House of Representatives as “a man recognized all over the world as the leader of the American bar.” Lawyer and diplomat Joseph H. Choate, another longtime friend, remarked in his memorial address at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York that Carter “had become at the time of his death one of [this nation's] best known and most valued citizens.”

In the last third of the twentieth century, the Progressive historians' account of Gilded Age law was overthrown by three interrelated strands of revisionist scholarship. One strand, which originated in work by Alan Jones, Charles McCurdy, and Les Benedict, thoroughly revised our understanding of Gilded Age constitutional development. Another strand, led by Robert Gordon, Thomas Grey, and Morton Horwitz, reformed our view of Gilded Age private law. The final strand, first elaborated by Duncan Kennedy, explored the unity of Gilded Age public and private law.

I am gratified by Stephen Siegel's generous analysis of my article and its place within the historiography of Gilded Age legal thought. In his comment, Siegel has performed the invaluable task of synthesizing the various strands of revisionist scholarship in this area and examining the growing body of, in his apt words, “revisions of the revision.” It should be noted that Siegel himself is at the forefront of the current wave of scholarship he describes. If Langdell is eventually ousted from his current position as the leading exemplar of late nineteenth-century private law jurisprudence, Siegel's seminal and sophisticated work, to which I am much indebted, will deserve much of the credit.