Law Commons^™

Appeals To The Privy Council From The American Colonies: An Annotated Digital Catalogue, Mary Bilder, Sharon O'Connor

Sharon Hamby O'Connor

In recognition of the three-hundred anniversary of the accession of George I, the Ames Foundation announces a new electronic resource: Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations: An Annotated Digital Catalogue. For the first time in centuries, the site makes accessible the important appellate cases that helped to define constitutional law before the creation of the United States Supreme Court.

The British Privy Council heard appeals from the 13 colonies that became the United States and from the other colonies in Canada and the Caribbean. Over 800 cases were appealed from the colonial supreme courts. Nearly one-third of …

America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

The U.S. Constitution opens by proclaiming the sovereignty of all citizens: "We the People." Robert Tsai's gripping history of alternative constitutions invites readers into the circle of those who have rejected this ringing assertion--the defiant groups that refused to accept the Constitution's definition of who "the people" are and how their authority should be exercised. America's Forgotten Constitutions is the story of America as told by dissenters: squatters, Native Americans, abolitionists, socialists, internationalists, and racial nationalists. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Tsai chronicles eight episodes in which discontented citizens took the extraordinary step of drafting a new constitution. He examines …

Making Claims: Indian Litigants And The Expansion Of The English Legal World In The Eighteenth Century, Arthur Fraas

Arthur Mitchell Fraas

This paper explores the British Imperial legal world of the mid-eighteenth century. Within this period, the previously confined spaces of English law and legal institutions became open to an ever widening set of legal subjects, both people as well as places. The paper focuses on what was at the time perhaps England’s most remote and murkily defined legal space, the East India Company (EIC) settlements at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta. The paper shows how a series of legal actors: metropolitan judges, Indian litigants and elite lawyers, first bridged the legal worlds of England and the subcontinent. I argue that by …

De Recto, De Jure, Or De Facto: Another Look At The History Of U.S./Tribal Relations, Marren Sanders

Marren Sanders

The history of relations between the United States and Native nations is often divided by scholars into specific eras defined by the Congressional policy in force at the time. Each federal policy had profound consequences for tribes and their sovereign ability to manage their lands and resources. This article surveys the history of U.S./tribal relations through the lens of the Professors Joseph Kalt and Joseph William Singer’s scheme of tribal sovereignty. Part I looks at how tribal sovereign rights to manage their people, lands, and resources have been recognized in varying degrees since the time of first contract with European …