Law Commons^™

Natural Law And The Rhetoric Of Empire: Reynolds V. United States, Polygamy, And Imperialism, Nathan B. Oman

Faculty Publications

In 1879, the U.S. Supreme Court construed the Free Exercise Clause for the first time, holding in Reynolds v. United States that Congress could punish Mormon polygamy. Historians have interpreted Reynolds, and the anti-polygamy legislation and litigation that it midwifed, as an extension of Reconstruction into the American West. This Article offers a new historical interpretation, one that places the birth of Free Exercise jurisprudence in Reynolds within an international context of Great Power imperialism and American international expansion at the end of the nineteenth century. It does this by recovering the lost theory of religious freedom that the Mormons …

Legal Education And Civility, Mark Niles

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Paper Thin: Freedom And Re-Enslavement In The Diaspora Of The Haitian Revolution, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carre and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified …

Coase, Institutionalism, And The Origins Of Law And Economics, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human preference or value, but accepted preference as given. It treated the business firm in the same way, focusing on how firms make market choices, but saying little about their internal workings.

“Institutionalism” historically refers to a group of economists who wrote mainly in the 1920s and 1930s. Their place in economic theory is outside the mainstream, but they have found new …

Women Behind The Wheel: Gender And Transportation Law, 1860-1930, Margo Schlanger

Book Chapters

Gender difference is only infrequently mentioned in recent negligence cases. To contemporary (mostly non-essentialist) eyes, gender difference seems to appear only mildly relevant to tort law's area of concern: care and harm to others and self. But in the early days of modern tort law, when gender differences loomed larger in the consciousness of American jurists, and unabashedly so, judicial opinions more frequently grappled with how negligence doctrine ought to take account of female difference. This chapter explores opinions published between approximately 1860 and 1930 that illuminate this issue in cases involving women drivers and passengers of cars and wagons. …

Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.