1. What are the characteristics of legal systems, in complex societies?

2. What is the relationship between law and societal complexity?

3. What accounted for differences in law between the American colonies?

4. What accounted for differences between law in the colonies and in England?

5. Why was colonial law substantially codified law?

6. Why did the colonies tend to severely limit capital punishment?

7. In colonial America, why were codes more popular than common law?

8. After the Revolution, why did the United States adopt the English rather than the French legal system?

9. Why were the works of Blackstone popular in the colonies?

10. Why was there hostility toward lawyers in colonial America?

11. Why did commercial and business interests favor the courts and common law over legislatures and statutes?

12. Why was the legal profession particularly unpopular in the wake of Revolutionary War?

13. What factors led to the calling of the 1787 convention in Philadelphia?

14. Why were state court systems decentralized?

15. Prior to the Civil War, what were the skills that gained an attorney a following and clients?

16. Why was the justice of the peace so important in rural America?

17. What were the causes of vigilantism on the American frontier?

18. What is the concept of sovereign immunity?

19. How did the Industrial Revolution change the activities of the judicial branch?

20. What was relationship between the courts and capitalism during the second half of the nineteenth century?