That human needs and social realities are the roots of all systems of jurisprudence is nowhere more demonstrable than in the evolution of the law of business. Professor Freyer shows that neither the English common law of negotiable instruments nor the modifications made in it in the colonial era were adequate in the lusty, far-flung, and rapidly growing young nation that the Constitution of the United States created. Innovation, he reveals, promptly followed.

Medieval strictures against usury were a long time dying, and the dynamic society of the English Renaissance could not afford to wait. Inflation, the growth of commerce, and the increasing splendor of the royal court created a strong demand for cash, especially among the landed gentry. Professor Shipley describes how one of the greatest of the moneylenders legalized the interest rates he charged, secured his loans against default, and (with limited success) maintained his reputation for respectability while engaged in a dubious occupation. Thomas Sutton and his like filled the gap that old church doctrine made in the social fabric of sixteenth-century England and smoothed the way for their successors who, after the ethical revolution of the seventeenth century, would he legitimized as private bankers.

The foreign economic policy of the United States in the aftermath of World War I was not isolationist, but selectively interventionist. With a group of very able American businessmen-diplomats in the lead, the nation pressured the French to accept the Dawes Plan, which, it was hoped, would solve the reparations problem, encourage healthy economic recovery and growth (which would embrace large sales of American capital goods to Germany), and ensure peaceful contentment in two nations that were more bitter enemies than ever. But, Professor Costigliola shows, a plan to rebuild Germany that was half private business and half foreign policy, and that was manipulated to both ends, could not succeed in the marketplace, where it had to live or die.

Students of the origins and accomplishments of government regulation of economic activity have open suspected that the laws on which regulation is based were addressed to problems and conditions of the past that no longer prevailed, or — what is worse — assumptions about the “real world” that are highly unrealistic. This is Professor West's main conclusion about the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, especially as regards its discount rate and international exchange policies.