Whether Americans lived on a farm or in a city, they had long been the least-governed people in the developed world. State and local governments did their best to fill this void. But insofar as modernization in Europe involved the creation of national administrative states – that is, a national government with a formidable bureaucracy – the United States was still premodern as late as the 1890s and apparently enjoying its unique brand of political innocence. Of course this bliss didn't last. During the next four decades, the country struggled to create new forms of national governance consistent with the needs of a very large, urban, industrial society.

In a rapidly expanding democracy with fluid class boundaries and an economy experiencing alternating surges of growth and depression, state building was at best a haphazard undertaking. The profession that played the leading role in that bitterly contested and bruising process was the law. Party politicians, reformers, the clergy, bureaucratic entrepreneurs within government, even economists, sociologists, philosophers, and an occasional historian made proposals. As would the representatives of the myriad interest groups eager to shape every political decision. Business would, of course, have its say. But it would largely be lawyers who would craft the compromises essential to an American democratic society. The lawyers dominated the entrepreneurial gap in politics. Like young parents trying to shop with their children in tow, the lawyers usually had more help than they wanted. But their profession was accustomed to conflict, hardened to defeat, and strategically positioned to shape the emerging American administrative state.