Circuit Riding: A Traveler's Guide to Where American Justice Was Made
Forthcoming
Most of American law happened somewhere with parking.
The country turned 250, and the official itinerary ran through Philadelphia, Boston, and a defensible number of gift shops. All of it worth the trip. But the founders wrote the opening argument, not the whole brief, and the rest of it got made in considerably worse buildings.
A Panama City courtroom where the right to a lawyer stopped depending on whether you could afford one. A bicycle shop in Dayton that started the longest patent fight in American aviation. A bus stop in Montgomery you already know about. A courthouse square you have driven past twice looking for a bathroom. Circuit Riding is a guide to those places, and to the people who spent years of their lives arguing in them.
Why Go Circuit Riding?
For most of the nineteenth century the law traveled. A judge and a handful of lawyers would ride a circuit of counties twice a year, holding court in each county seat for a week or two before packing up for the next one, the cases stacking up in the meantime because there was nobody in town to hear them.
History is messy, law is messy, and the courts are the imperfect machinery we built to sort the two out. For a hundred years that machinery arrived by horse and left when the docket was clear, which is why the country's hardest questions got settled in ordinary rooms and on ordinary corners that almost no one has thought to mark.
The judges do not ride anymore. The route is still there, and it belongs to you as much as to anyone.
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