Legal History Commons^™

Memory Of A Racist Past — Yazoo: Integration In A Deep-Southern Town By Willie Morris, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

Willie Morris was in many ways larger than life. Born in Jackson, Mississippi, he moved with his family to Yazoo City, Mississippi at the age of six months. He attended and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin where his scathing editorials against racism in the South earned him the hatred of university officials. After graduation, he attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. He would join Harper’s Magazine in 1963, rising to become the youngest editor-in-chief in the magazine’s history. He remained at this post until 1971 when he resigned amid dropping ad sales and a lack of …

From Natural Law To Natural Inferiority: The Construction Of Racist Jurisprudence In Early Virginia, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Science informed American jurisprudence during the age of the Revolution. Colonials used science and naturalism to navigate the wilderness, define themselves against the British, and forge a new national identity and constitutional order. American legal historians have long noted the influence of science upon the Founding generation, and historians of American slavery have casually noted the influence of science upon early American racism as organized and standardized in slave codes. This article seeks to synthesize the work of American legal historians and historians of American slavery by showing how natural law jurisprudence, anchored in scientific discourse and vocabulary, brought about …

The Law Review Approach: What The Humanities Can Learn, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay describes how the law review process generally works and then discusses what the humanities can learn and borrow from the law review process. It ends by advocating for a hybrid law review/peer review approach to publishing. The law review process is not a panacea for our publishing ills. It has several drawbacks and shortcomings. This essay highlights the positives and notes some of the negatives of the law review publishing process, but a lengthy explanation of all that is good or bad about law reviews is not my aim. Every law review has its idiosyncrasies and methodologies, but …

Godsdienst Als Hype, Wouter H. De Been

Wouter H. de Been

No abstract provided.

Social Justice In Turbulent Times: Critical Race Theory And Occupy Wall Street, Nick J. Sciullo

Nick J. Sciullo

In this brief article, I tackle several issues that are critically important to progressive move(ment)s in the law and in society as a whole. I am convinced that the progressive community can make great strides in enriching the law and people’s experience with it through continued articulation and combined sense of theory and practice. We need to move beyond litigation and engage our critical consciousness to embrace activism on all fronts. This is why I locate a positive politics of struggle in the Occupy Movements that I believe progressives ought to embrace . We must simultaneously come to grips with …

My “Country” Lies Over The Ocean: Seasteading And Polycentric Law, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

This essay considers the implications of the Seasteading Institute upon notions of law and sovereignty and argues that seasteading could make possible the implementation or ordering of polycentric legal systems while providing evidence for the viability of private-property anarchism or anarchocapitalism, at least in their nascent forms. This essay follows in the wake of Edward P. Stringham’s edition Anarchy and the Law and treats seasteading and polycentric law as concrete realities that lend credence to certain anarchist theories. Polycentric law in particular allows for institutional diversity that enables a multiplicity of rules to coexist and even compete in the open …

American Legal Realism: Sound And Fury Signifying Nothing?, Wouter H. De Been

Wouter H. de Been

No abstract provided.

Transnational Law: An Essay In Definition With A Polemic Addendum, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

What is transnational law? Various procedures and theories have emanated from this slippery signifier, but in general academics and legal practitioners who use the term have settled on certain common meanings for it. My purpose in this article is not to disrupt but to clarify these meanings by turning to literary theory and criticism that regularly address transnationality. Cultural and postcolonial studies are the particular strains of literary theory and criticism to which I will attend. To review “transnational law,” examining its literary inertia and significations, is the objective of this article, which does not purport to settle the matter …

Jefferson's "Laws Of Nature": Newtonian Influence And The Dual Valence Of Jurisprudence And Science, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

Jefferson appears to have conceived of natural law rather differently from his predecessors - namely, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, and, among others, William Blackstone. This particular pedigree looked to divine decree or moral order to anchor natural law philosophy. But Jefferson’s various writings, most notably the Declaration and Notes on the State of Virginia, champion the thinking of a natural historian, a man who celebrated reason and scientific method, who extolled fact over fancy, material over the immaterial, observation over superstition, and experiment over divine revelation. They reveal, in other words, an …

Haunted By History's Ghostly Gaps: A Literary Critique Of The Dred Scott Decision And Its Historical Treatments, Allen P. Mendenhall

Allen Mendenhall

In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney eliminates Dred Scott the man from the text and divests Scott of a body, thereby transforming him into a sort of incorporeal ghost that signals the traces and tropes of slavery. Subsequent historians, journalists, and politicians have made Scott even more inaccessible by either relying on Taney’s text, which erases Scott, or by failing to recover Scott’s narrative. Taney’s opinion codified “the facts” of the case as official or authoritative despite a lack of reference to their human subject. Later writers relied on this received version despite its obvious …

Relativism, Reflective Equilibrium, And Justice, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS.

The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into …