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Legal History

Felice J Batlan

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Law

Women And Justice For The Poor: A History Of Legal Aid, 1863–1945, Felice Batlan Dec 2014

Women And Justice For The Poor: A History Of Legal Aid, 1863–1945, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

No abstract provided.

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Legal History And The Politics Of Inclusion, Felice Batlan Dec 2013

Legal History And The Politics Of Inclusion, Felice Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This review considers four very different books that explore how gender and race have structured law and the legal profession. Each interrogates the legitimacy of law by demonstrating how it has produced multiple injustices, thereby challenging the myth that law is about equity or fairness, and that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights produced a set of inalienable rights and liberties that applied to all. 

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Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2011

Women's Legal History Symposium Introduction: Making History, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This essay introduces the Chicago-Kent Symposium on Women's Legal History: A Global Perspective. It seeks to situate the field of women's legal history and to explore what it means to begin writing a transnational women's history which transcends and at times disrupts the nation state. In doing so, it sets forth some of the fundamental premises of women's legal history and points to new ways of writing such histories.

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The Gendered Lives Of Legal Aid: Lay Lawyers, Social Workers, And The Bar, 1863-1960, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2010

The Gendered Lives Of Legal Aid: Lay Lawyers, Social Workers, And The Bar, 1863-1960, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

The Gendered Life of Legal Aid, 1863-1960 (manuscript in process) will be the first monograph on the history of civil legal aid in the United States. By closely examining the history of legal aid in New York, Chicago, and Boston, it presents a number of arguments with wide-ranging implications and it is animated by a host of conflicts. These include the relationship between legal aid and citizenship, the changing status of domestic relations law, the interactions between lawyers and social workers and their different understandings of the role and nature of law, what services legal aid should provide, and even …

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Florence Kelley And The Battle Against Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism, Felice J. Batlan Dec 2009

Florence Kelley And The Battle Against Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

The usual story of the demise of laissez-faire constitutionalism in the 1930’s features heroes such as Louis Brandeis, Felix Frankfurter and the great male legal progressives of the day who rose up from academia, the bench, and the bar, to put an end to what historians label "legal orthodoxy." In this essay, I seek to demonstrate that Florence Kelley was a crucially important legal progressive who was at the front lines of drafting and defending new legislation that courts were striking down as violating the Fourteenth Amendment and State constitutions. Looking at who was drafting and lobbying for path breaking …

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Law In The Time Of Cholera: Disease, State Power, And Quarantine Past And Future, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2007

Law In The Time Of Cholera: Disease, State Power, And Quarantine Past And Future, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

When the World Trade Center Twin Towers fell in 2001, the United States entered a period of what seems like perpetual crisis-a country increasingly threatened from within and outside its borders. In the aftermath of 9/11, Arab Americans, as well as other foreign nationals, worried about their immigration status and the potential violence they might face and feared that they would be painted as enemies of the United States. In law enforcement initiatives following the attacks, Arab American men were jailed, often for significant periods of time, on charges that were at best specious. Likewise, enemy combatants in Guantinamo Bay …

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Law And The Fabric Of The Everyday: Settlement Houses, Sociological Jurisprudence, And The Gendering Of Urban Legal Culture, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2006

Law And The Fabric Of The Everyday: Settlement Houses, Sociological Jurisprudence, And The Gendering Of Urban Legal Culture, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

This Article argues that at the turn of the twentieth century, settlement houses were particularly important and vibrant legal sites, in which women settlement workers played groundbreaking and multiple legal roles.' Settlement houses created a geographical and intellectual space where diverse parties participated in analyzing, examining, discussing, popularizing, producing, and reforming law. More broadly, settlement houses were part of a rich and prolific urban legal environment that produced and prompted legal innovation and experimentation. Surprisingly, however, legal scholars have almost entirely neglected the groundbreaking legal work that settlement houses performed. Such neglect results in an impoverished understanding of fin-de-siecle legal …

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Engendering Legal History, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2005

Engendering Legal History, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

No abstract provided.

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A Re-Evaluation Of The New York Court Of Appeals: The Home, The Market And Labor, 1885-1905, Felice J. Batlan Jan 2002

A Re-Evaluation Of The New York Court Of Appeals: The Home, The Market And Labor, 1885-1905, Felice J. Batlan

Felice J Batlan

Closely examining a range of New York Court of Appeals police‐power cases during the period 1885 to 1905, this article demonstrates that the New York Court had a long history of accepting and continually expanding the police power. In these police‐power cases, one finds the court grappling with an evolving sense of how to balance the concept of and need for a well‐regulated society against the rights of an individual in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, as well as a tenacious refusal to abandon Victorian bourgeois norms regarding the dichotomy between the home and workplace. By contextualizing and historicizing …

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