City of Courts

What could be more ‘liberal’ than the modern idea of social responsibility for crime - that crime is less the product of free will than of poverty and other social forces beyond the individual’s control? And what could be more ‘progressive’ than the belief that the law should aim for social, not merely individual, justice? In this work of social, cultural, and legal history, Michael Willrich uncovers the contested origins and paradoxical consequences of these two protean concepts in the cosmopolitan cities of industrial America at the turn of the twentieth century. In Progressive Era Chicago, social activists, judges, and working-class families seeking justice transformed criminal courts into laboratories of progressive democracy. Willrich argues that this progressive effort to ‘socialize’ urban justice redefined American liberalism and the rule of law, laying an urban seedbed for the modern administrative welfare state.