Law and American Political Development

This article explores a tension in the Law and American Political Development (APD) literature over the conceptualization of an institution. Moving between two fields in mutual exchange—historical-interpretive scholarship on law/courts and scholarship on APD—the article shows how concerns and sensibilities seem to converge yet are also in conflict. The article argues that a misleading opposition between institutions and discourse is a source of that conflict, while revisiting various theoretical frameworks in an effort to overcome that opposition. Recent work on race, law, and development during the Jim Crow era is taken up with the aim of showing how we might think more capaciously about the formal and discursive properties of institutions.