Customer Reviews

Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic: The case of Fletcher v. Peck

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The landmark case of Fletcher v. Peck (1810) stems from the massive land-grab scandal in Georgia's Yazoo territory (now Alabama and Mississippi) beginning in 1795.

The facts of the case cover 15 years and are fairly complicated. Magrath's convoluted telling of it makes the already complex story a bit hard to follow. But his political and legal analysis is superb, and overall it is a very good book: fair, comprehensive, and sophisticated in its interpretation of (a) the political climate in the early republic, involving the Federalist and Republican parties; (b) legislation in both Georgia and the U.S. Congress surrounding the prickly Yazoo issues; and (c) the 1810 Supreme Court decision in Fletcher v. Peck (when John Marshall was chief justice), which fortified the contract clause of the Constitution and established the doctrine of vested property rights.

Found in Article 1, Section 10, the contract clause prohibits the states from passing any law "impairing the obligations of contracts."

Magrath was a political science professor at Brown University when he wrote this book in 1966.