ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the movement of law between formal, judicial settings, and less formal spaces for dispute resolution involved the people – quite literally the bodies of the people asserting and defending legal claims – in the action of the law. The contest between popular and elite professional control of adjudication can be seen in the transformation of specific procedural rules for adjudication. As historians have confronted violent nineteenth-century social practices such as lynching, dueling, strikes, riots, and courthouse burnings, the temptation has ever been to yoke them, sometimes explicitly, to the same narrative of transformation that is thought to explain the enclosure of justice. The class element and elitism of Wilson's defense of dueling comes into sharp relief when that practice of judicial dispute resolution is contrasted with the street duels between labor and capital that became increasingly common later in the century.
