Both Nick Parrillo and Ashraf Ahmed rightly characterize New Democracy as a sequel to my 1996 monograph The People’s Welfare:  Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America which attempted to demonstrate “how American state and local governments between the Revolution and the Civil War” regulated and administered “private economic activity on matters like product quality, urban marketing, the risk of fire, the spread of infectious disease, and the vice… [read post]