![]() Professor Conklin’s research interests are in American legal history, with a focus on dispute resolution and rights dialogues in early America. Her dissertation at the University of Virginia was an intellectual history of the meaning of the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. She studied law and history at the University of Virginia through a joint J.D./Ph.D. With this work, Conklin makes important contributions to the fields of early American intellectual and legal history.Ĭarli Conklin currently serves as Associate Professor at the Law School at the University of Missouri. Both applications suggest we consider anew how the phrase, and its underlying legal philosophies, were understood in the founding era. For the founders, the pursuit of happiness was the individual right to pursue a life lived in harmony with the law of nature and a public duty to govern in accordance with that law. ![]() ![]() In this insightful volume, Carli Conklin considers the pursuit of happiness across a variety of intellectual traditions, and explores its usage in two key legal texts of the Founding Era, the Declaration and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.įor Blackstone, the pursuit of happiness was a science of jurisprudence, by which his students could know, and then rightly apply, the first principles of the Common Law. Scholars have long debated the meaning of the pursuit of happiness, yet have tended to define it narrowly, focusing on a single intellectual tradition, and on the use of the term within a single text, the Declaration of Independence. The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History By Carli Conklin ![]()
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