ABSTRACT
For most practical purposes American judicial history begins after the Revolution. Administration of justice in colonial America was at first executive and legislative, and these types of non-judicial justice persisted well into the last century. To understand the administration of justice in American cities at the end of the nineteenth century, we must perceive the problems of the administration of justice in a homogeneous pioneer or rural community of the first half of the nineteenth century and the difficulties with which lawyers and jurists had to contend in meeting those problems. In Fennimore Cooper's Pioneers, the story opens with a striking picture of central New York in 1833, a region which had been a wilderness forty years before. One part of the English law of crimes, as our fathers found it, was harsh and brutal, as befitted a law made to put down murder by violence, robbery, rape and cattle stealing in a rough and ready community.
