Amazon.com description: Product Description: Now in a new edition with extensive updates by Peter Karsten, The Magic Mirror chronicles American law from its English origins to the present. It offers comprehensive treatment of twentieth-century developments and sets American law and legal institutions in the broad context of social, economic, and political events, weaving together themes from the history of both constitutional and private law. This edition of The Magic Mirror features additional coverage of resistance to law through U.S. history, the customary law of self-governing bodies, and Native Americans. It also has updated coverage for law in society, the legal implications of social change in areas such as criminal justice, the rights of women, blacks, the family, and children. It further examines regional differences in American legal culture, the creation of the administrative and security states, the development of American federalism, and the rise of the legal profession. The Magic Mirror pays close attention to the evolution of substantive law categories--such as contracts, torts, negotiable instruments, real property, trusts and estates, and civil procedure--and addresses the intellectual evolution of American law, surveying movements such as legal realism and critical legal studies. The authors conclude that over its history American law has been remarkably fluid, adapting in form and substance to each successive generation without ever fully resolving the underlying social and economic conflicts that first provoke demands for legal change.