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Law Library Blog (January 2017): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

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Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

In case after case, prosecutors, judges and juries therefore still struggle to come up with a definition of slavery, looking for some set of criteria or indicia that will enable them to discern whether the phenomenon they are observing constitutes enslavement. In this definitional effort, contemporary jurists may imagine that in the past, surely the question was simpler: someone either was or was not a slave. However, the existence of a set of laws declaring that persons could be owned as property did not, even in the nineteenth century, answer by itself the question of whether a given person was …

Review Of The Province Of Legislation Determined: Legal Theory In Eighteenth-Century Britain, Thomas A. Green

Reviews

David Lieberman's lucid and sure-footed reinterpretationof late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century jurisprudence is original, thoughtful, analytically acute, and a pleasure to read. Lieberman argues that Bentham's law reform ideas must be viewed in relation to earlier (and contemporary) reform traditions. Bentham's views were more complex than the long-held myth would have it, partly because they were more derivative, at least in his early enterprises, combining as they did a reception of earlier notions with the novelty for which he is usually credited. Blackstone and Mansfield, on this account, were not the match stick figures they are sometimes made out to be; the …

Agenda: External Development Affecting The National Parks: Preserving "The Best Idea We Ever Had", University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center

External Development Affecting the National Parks: Preserving "The Best Idea We Ever Had" (September 14-16)

Conference organizers and/or faculty included University of Colorado School of Law professors Lawrence J. MacDonnell and Daniel Magraw.

The conference will be held at the Aspen Lodge, adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park near Estes Park, Colorado.

It was Wallace Stegner who called the national parks "the best idea we ever had." The continuing increases in usage attest to their popularity. National parks are created to preserve areas of special scenic and cultural value for enjoyment and use. Managing the parks in a manner that protects the important values and purposes for which they were created presents important and difficult …

Review Of The Justice Of The Western Consular Courts In Nineteenth Century Japan, Whitmore Gray

Reviews

Richard Chang attacks the generalization accepted by many historians that the Western consular tribunals in nineteenth-century Japan were so partial- toward West- erners and against Japanese-that they seldom rendered evenhanded justice. His study required two steps. First he tried to determine how many "mixed" cases came to trial-cases in which aJapanese brought a claim against a foreign resident in a consular court or was the complaining party in criminal proceedings against a foreigner. Between 1875 and 1895 there were five such cases that were widely reported and commented on at the time, and that have often been cited as examples. …