Author Description

This lively and entertaining historical study examines the impact of English common law and lawyers on the early steam railway industry. Grounded in a wide variety of legal and industrial source materials, the study's analytical narrative chapters examine a range of interactions between early railway capitalism and the evolving culture, doctrine, and procedures of Victorian lawyers. Rande Kostal's study includes an in-depth analysis of the legal ramifications of the great railway manias, law and the infiltration of the English countryside, railway accidents, corporate monopolism, and the organization of England's first corporate legal departments. This superbly crafted interpretation of the profound but ambiguous engagement of common law and lawyering with a dynamic sector of the world's first industrial economy contains much that will be of interest to legal historians as well as railway enthusiasts.