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Even though The Genesis of Nineteenth-Century Civil Codes in the United States is a one-country study (and a historical one at that), the book is of great interest to comparative law. This is not only because the study of codification has long been a staple of the discipline. More importantly, the book deals with “the translation and acculturation of a legal concept—the civil code—in a predominantly common law country” (p. 9) and it compares American codifications of both the civil and the common law. Julie Rocheton downplays the differences between the civil and the common law traditions in the present context; as a result, she fails to spell out an important lesson to be learned from her study—a point to which we shall return below.
A threshold question is whether the work takes us beyond the existing literature on the topic. The answer is a resounding yes. Rocheton goes far beyond the two pertinent books.1 Rocheton also takes us beyond the panoply of law review articles on the topic which have typically focused on individual American codes.2 As Rocheton puts it in her Introduction, “[p]ushing beyond works which have tended to study each state or case in isolation, this book excavates the history of private law codification in the United States as a whole.” This is a promising and, in many ways, successful, undertaking.3
