The Federal Courts, Localism, and the National Economy, 1865–1900

It is a truism of American constitutional history that the federal judiciary was expected to facilitate interstate commerce. The right of individuals to remove cases to a federal court from locally prejudiced state courts was recognized under a wide range of circumstances. But it seemed less and less natural, as more and more of the nation's business came to be transacted by the “trusts” on a national basis, for corporations to be accorded the same rights. Professor Freyer shows that a major campaign, which had some success in the 1880s, was mounted to deny corporations the right of escape to federal courts. In the end, however, the nation's lawmakers recognized that the problem of the growing concentration of capital would have to be solved by something more sophisticated than frontier justice.