On a Case-By-Case Basis: Ethnicity and Los Angeles Courts, 1850-1875‪.‬

In his important study A History of American Law, Lawrence Friedman commented that by 1850, in addition to American emigrants, "what traveled west, more important than form, was the general legal culture, the general ways of thinking about law .... The notion was: organize or die; and it was the theme of American law, East and West, in the last half of the nineteenth century, in every area and arena of life." (1) Friedman also pointed out that, in late antebellum America, "[a]t best, criminal justice trembled on the brink of professionalism," although he was referring specifically to large Eastern metropolises such as Philadelphia, Boston, and New York. (2) At the time of its incorporation under the American legal system in 1850, Los Angeles was in contrast a small, rural, frontier town, a world away from the major cities of the East Coast. It was also a community perched on the precipice of Friedman's "organize or die" concept and, for the most part, seemed far removed from the "brink of professionalism." Emerging after the Mexican-American War and transformed by the Gold Rush beef trade in southern California cattle, which was itself supplanted by agriculture in the post-Civil War period, Los Angeles's "general legal culture" was also in transition and flux as the town was often beset by violent conflict. (3)