Of "Good Laws" and "Good Men"

About the Book

During the seventeenth century, a Quaker minority used the law to maintain the legitimacy of its rule in the Delaware Valley. William Offutt Jr.’s social history places focus on the region’s legal process. The societies established in the valley found success after implementing reforms that gave the expanding population faith in the legitimacy of a legal system built by a Quaker elite. Offutt draws on more than 2000 civil and 1100 criminal cases and finds that Quakers—the “Good Men”—were disproportionately represented as justices, officers, and jurors in the system of “Good Laws,” and fared better than the rest of the population in dealing with it.