ABSTRACT
Among the most active - and most successful - reformers of the Golden Age were those advocating prison reform. Starting in New York and Pennsylvania, prison systems were established with the assumption that criminals could be rehabilitated by isolation from each other during imprisonment. Ascendancy came in a rush with the Revolutionary lawyer's reach for cultural legitimacy. John Adams' first inclination had been to preach. The priorities that held the early American lawyer to literature were brittle, and this was a period of extraordinary social, economic, and intellectual flux. Technical competence triumphed over general learning and philosophical discourse as case law accumulated. Where only three appeals in corporation law came before the Supreme Court prior to 1815, the case load in this new area required a textbook by 1832. Virtually every lawyer-writer in America viewed the changing nature of his country with alarm.
