Durand's Progress

One of these days I'm going to finally sit down and write an article that I've been hankering to write for years -- it'll be about the law related to the images of progress in Asher Durand's landscape painting Progress. I'm going to call it "The Law of Progress," and it'll talk about how antebellum US law facilitated the progress depicted in the landscape. Sort of art history meets Horwitz' Transformation and Willard Hurst's Law and the Conditions of Freedom. At some level I think we spend a little too much time focused on the way that law facilitates economic growth -- that is, to be sure, a key theme, especially in the nineteenth century. However, I think there are other themes that are important, like the way law promoted control and order -- and how it kept the system of property in place, of which slavery was of course a prime component.  But I want to use Progress as a way of organizing that essay that will discuss how the "whole system" of property and law fit together to promote the United States' empire.  The Law of Progress ... I have early sketches of pieces of this in Property and Progress: Antebellum Landscape Art and Property Law in the McGeorge Law Review back in 2009.