Law Commons^™

From Blackstone’S Common Law Duty Of Parents To Educate Their Children To A Constitutional Right Of Parents To Control The Education Of Their Children, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

Blackstone’s Commentaries stated that the common law imposed a duty on parents to provide for the maintenance, protection, and education of their children, and of these, the duty to provide an education was "of far the greatest importance."

Early on American courts cited Blackstone for the proposition of the common law duty of parents educate their children. As the nineteenth century progressed, public and private schools were formed in most American states, and a number of states enacted compulsory education laws.

American states also sometimes also enacted laws that interfered with the freedom of parents to direct the education of …

Eckart Otto, Das Deuteronomium: Politische Theologie Und Rechtsreform In Juda Und Assyrien, Steven W. Holloway

Libraries

No abstract provided.

Revisiting 'Dreyfus': A More Complete Account Of A Trial By Mathematics, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

Legal literature and case law depicts the infamous conviction of Alfred Dreyfus for treason and espionage in 1899 as a prime example of the irresistible power of even grossly fallacious mathematical demonstrations to overwhelm a legal tribunal. This essay shows that Dreyfus is not a case of mathematics run amok, unchecked and uncomprehended. To the contrary, the defects in the mathematical proof were dramatically exposed, and this evidence did not lead Dreyfus's judges to condemn him. This history undercuts the reliance of modern courts and commentators on Dreyfus as an indication or illustration of the alleged dangers of probability evidence …

No Right To Respect: Dred Scott And The Southern Honor Culture, 42 New Eng. L. Rev. 79 (2007), Cecil J. Hunt Ii

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Article reflects on the infamous decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), in which the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the constitutionality of slavery. This Article considers this infamous case and the distance the nation has come since it was decided as well as its continuing legacy on the contemporary American struggle for racial equality. In Dred Scott the Court held that slavery was constitutional because it was consistent with the intent of the Framers and because black people were "a subordinate and inferior class of beings who... whether emancipated or not.., …

Birth Of An Institution: Horace Gray And The Lost Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

In a vault hidden away in a downtown Boston bank rests a large silver loving cup. The cup was presented to Associate Justice Horace Gray on March 22, 1902 by his law clerks, and engraved on its tarnished surface are the names of the nineteen Harvard Law School graduates who served as Justice Gray’s law clerks. While the details surrounding the presentation of the cup have been lost to history, the gift was likely prompted by the failing health of Justice Gray and his future departure from the Supreme Court. The loving cup is still held by the Gray family, …

Empiricism And International Law: Insights For Investment Treaty Dispute Resolution, Susan Franck

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

While scholars in the United States increasingly focus on the empirical dimension of legal scholarship, there have been challenges in using empiricism to explore international legal issues. Rather than relying on logic or instinct alone, empirical methodologies can provide scholars with tools to gain new facts, see existing ideas through a different lens, and engage in a more nuanced analysis of international law phenomena. There appears to be a natural synergy between empiricism and international investment treaty dispute resolution. With calls for trade time outs by U.S. presidential candidates, there is interest in how investment treaties function, whether they achieve …

The Earp-Holliday Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The Old West's most famous gunbattle lasted all of about thirty seconds, but it left three men dead, three other men shot, and enough questions to occupy historians for more than a century. The gunfight also led to criminal charges being filed against the three Earp brothers (Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan) and Doc Holliday who, near the O. K. Corral on October 26, 1881, decided to enforce the law against four notorious cowboys. The hearing that followed the shoot-out considered the question of whether the Earps and Hollidays killed out of a justifiable fear for their own lives or simply …

The Trial Of Charles Guiteau: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

A sense of having been wronged, together with a warped idea of political duty, brought Charles Julius Guiteau to the Baltimore and Potomac Station in Washington on July 2, 1881. On that same Saturday morning, President James Abram Garfield strode into the station to catch the 9:30 A.M. limited express, which was to take him to the commencement ceremonies of his alma mater, Williams College - and from there, Garfield planned to head off on a much-awaited vacation. He never made the 9:30. Within seconds of entering the station, Garfield was felled by two of Guiteau's bullets, the opening act …

Marbury In Mexico: Judicial Review’S Precocious Southern Migration, M C. Mirow

Faculty Publications

In attempting to construct United States-style judicial review for the Mexican Supreme Court in the 1880s, Ignacio Vallarta, president of the court, read Marbury in a way that preceded this use of the case in the United States. Using this surprising fact as a central example, this article makes several important contributions to the field of comparative constitutional law. The work demonstrates that through constitutional migration, novel readings of constitutional sources can arise in foreign fora. In an era when the United States Supreme Court may be accused of parochialism in its constitutional analysis, the article addresses the current controversy …

The Trial Of John Brown: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The arrest, trial, and execution of John Brown in the fall of 1859 came at a critical moment in United State history. According to historian David S. Reynolds in his biography, "John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights" (2005), Brown's actions and statements following his failed attempt to begin a slave insurrection near Harper's Ferry, Virginia so polarized northern and southern opinion on the slavery issue as to ensure Abraham Lincoln's election and cause the Civil War to occur perhaps two decades earlier than it might have otherwise. Reynolds is quick …

The First Restatement Of Agency: What Was The Agenda?, Deborah A. Demott

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Mcmartin Preschool Abuse Trial, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The McMartin Preschool Abuse Trial, the longest and most expensive criminal trial in American history, should serve as a cautionary tale. When it was all over, the government had spent seven years and $15 million dollars investigating and prosecuting a case that led to no convictions. More seriously, the McMartin case left in its wake hundreds of emotionally damaged children, as well as ruined careers for members of the McMartin staff. No one paid a bigger price than Ray Buckey, one of the principal defendants in the case, who spent five years in jail awaiting trial for a crime (most …

Review Of Napoleon And The British, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Was he fascinating or repulsive? The bold courier of republican liberty under law or the scabrous carrier of lethal Jacobin corruption? Heaven-sent deliverer or providential scourge? Even his name was up for grabs: was it Bonaparte or Buonaparte? One need only dip into contemporary sources to realize that the British were obsessed with Napoleon. Stuart Semmel has done a first-rate job combing through those sources and using them to illuminate political culture. (Semmel does not offer the primary quotations I will use here. I offer them for fun, or to pile on with glee, and not at all to reproach …

Toward A History Of Children As Witnesses, David S. Tanenhaus, William Bush

Scholarly Works

This brief essay offers a selective overview of recent trends in the historical scholarship on American childhood from the origins of the American Revolution to the early years of the Cold War. This overview of the literature has two purposes. First, it highlights recent socio-cultural scholarship that presents substantive challenges to the conventional ways of understanding the history of children and the law. Second, in so doing, it points out that legal histories concerned solely with doctrinal matters can, and often do, present a limited and distorted window into the past. Instead, the essay argues that the place of children, …

Reconsidering Procedural Conformity Statutes, Thomas O. Main

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

State V. John Scopes (The Monkey Trial), Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in motion by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming especially strong in the American South. Who would dominate American culture -- the modernists or the traditionalists? …

The Chicago Eight Conspiracy Trial, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

What did it all mean? Was the Chicago Seven Trial merely, as one commentator suggested, a monumental non-event? Was it, as others argue, an important battle for the hearts and minds of the American people? Or is it best seen as a symbol of the conflicts of values that characterized the late sixties? These are some of the questions that surround one of the most unusual courtroom spectacles in American history, the 1969-70 trial of seven radicals accused of conspiring to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Culturally and politically, 1968 was one of the …

Escape From The Battle Of The Forms: Keep It Simple, Stupid, Corneill A. Stephens

Faculty Publications By Year

This Article reviews the history of the "battle of the forms" issue arising when contracting parties submit conflicting terms to each other in attempting to form a contract and how courts have resolved issues arising from this, both under the original Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) Article 2 and the Revised Article 2. The author reviews the economic circumstances that gave rise to the current use of standard form contracts, such as lower transaction costs and the ability of a company to control the terms and the discretion of its personnel. He discusses how battle of the forms issues were resolved …

Taking Victims Seriously: A Dworkinian Theory Of Punishment, Luis E. Chiesa

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Controversy Over The Legacy Highway In Utah: An Opportunity For Invitational Rhetoric, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

Beginning in the mid 1990s, residents of Utah began to debate the merits of the “Legacy Highway,” a large highway that would run near the Great Salt Lake in an attempt to alleviate the clogged commute on Interstate-15, which runs north/south through Salt Lake City, the state’s capital. Perhaps not surprisingly, environmental groups were upset with this proposed governmental project. Groups like the Advocates for Safe and Efficient Transportation and the Utah Department of Transportation faced off against the Sierra Club, Stop the Legacy Highway, and Utahns for Better Transportation. Generous amounts of rhetoric, including public discussion and litigation, resulted …

Gambling And The Law In The Nineteenth Century South: Evidence From Nacogdoches County, Texas, 1838-1839, Joshua C. Tate

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Race, Rights, And The Thirteenth Amendment: Defining The Badges And Incidents Of Slavery, William M. Carter Jr.

Articles

The Supreme Court has held that the Thirteenth Amendment prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude and also empowers Congress to end any lingering "badges and incidents of slavery." The Court, however, has failed to provide any guidance as to defining the badges and incidents of slavery when Congress has failed to identify a condition or form of discrimination as such. This has led the lower courts to conclude that the judiciary's role under the Thirteenth Amendment is limited to enforcing only the Amendment's prohibition of literal enslavement.

This article has two primary objectives. First, it offers an interpretive framework for defining …

Roscoe Pound And The Future Of The Good Government Movement, Charles G. Geyh

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Book Review. All Politics Is Global: Explaining International Regulatory Regimes By Daniel W. Drezner, David Fidler

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Amistad Case, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The improbable voyage of the schooner Amistad and the court proceedings and diplomatic maneuverings that resulted from that voyage form one of the most significant stories of the nineteenth century. When Steven Spielberg chose the Amistad case as the subject of his 1997 feature film, he finally brought it the attention the case had long deserved, but never received. The Amistad case energized the fledgling abolitionist movement and intensified conflict over slavery, prompted a former President to go before the Supreme Court and condemn the policies of a present Administration, soured diplomatic relations between the United States and Spain for …

The Leonard Peltier Trial, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minnesota in 1968 to promote traditional Native American culture and instill pride in the Native American community. AIM's targets included both the federal government, with whom it had a long list of grievances (especially focused on its record of many broken treaties) and progressive Indians, who they believed undermined native traditions and solidarity. In February 1973, AIM instigated a seventy-one day takeover of the site of a famous 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The massacre had resulted in the deaths - at the hands of the United States Calvary - …

The Trial Of Susan B. Anthony For Illegal Voting, Douglas O. Linder

Faculty Works

More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared that the right which woman needed above every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was the right of suffrage. Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of her life fighting for the right to vote. She would work tirelessly: giving speeches, petitioning Congress and …

On The Fortieth Anniversary Of The Miranda Case: Why We Needed It, How We Got It--And What Happened To It, Yale Kamisar

Articles

Last year (the year I gave the talk on which this article is based) marked the fortieth anniversary of Miranda v. Arizona,' one of the most praised, most maligned-and probably one of the most misunderstood-Supreme Court cases in American history. It is difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate Miranda without looking back at the test for the admissibility of confessions that preceded it.

Dworkin V. The Philosophers: A Review Essay On Justice In Robes, Michael S. Green

Faculty Publications

In this review essay, Professor Michael Steven Green argues that Dworkin's reputation among his fellow philosophers has needlessly suffered because of his refusal to back down from his "semantic sting" argument against H. L. A. Hart. Philosophers of law have uniformly rejected the semantic sting argument as a fallacy. Nevertheless Dworkin reaffirms the argument in Justice in Robes, his most recent collection of essays, and devotes much of the book to stubbornly, and unsuccessfully, defending it. This is a pity, because the failure of the semantic sting argument in no way undermines Dworkin's other arguments against Hart.

The Era Of Deference: Courts, Expertise, And The Emergence Of New Deal Administrative Law, Reuel E. Schiller

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.