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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Creating Hammer V. Dagenhart, Logan E. Sawyer Iii
Creating Hammer V. Dagenhart, Logan E. Sawyer Iii
Scholarly Works
Hammer v. Dagenhart is among the best known cases in the canon of constitutional law. It struck down the first federal child labor law on the grounds that Congress’s commerce power allowed it to prohibit the interstate shipment of harmful goods, like impure food and drugs, but not harmless goods, like the products of child labor. Withering criticism of the decision spread from Justice Holmes’s famous dissent to law reviews, treatises, casebooks, and constitutional law classes. For nearly a century the decision has been scorned as inconsistent with precedent, incoherent as policy, and driven solely by the Court’s reactionary commitment …
American Legal History Survey: Syllabus, Anders Walker
American Legal History Survey: Syllabus, Anders Walker
All Faculty Scholarship
This syllabus provides an overview of American Legal History, focusing on the manner in which law has been used to organize American society. Several themes will be traced through the semester, including law’s role in encouraging innovation and regulating social relations, in part through the elaboration of legal disciplines like property, tort, contract, criminal law, tax, business associations, administrative law, environmental law, securities regulation, commercial law, immigration, and health law. Emphasis will also be placed on the origins and evolution of constitutional law, from the founding to the present.
Legal Medievalism In Lex Mercatoria Scholarship, Ralf Michaels
Legal Medievalism In Lex Mercatoria Scholarship, Ralf Michaels
Faculty Scholarship
This short reaction piece to an article by Emily Kadens asks why a long-refuted story of an alleged uniform medieval lex mercatoria is still being maintained. The answer is that the story serves not as an actual history but instead as a foundation myth. Attempts to falsify the myth with historical data are therefore futile: the myth derives its value not from its truth value but from its symbolic power.