Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Legal History Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Legal History

The Changing Landscape Of 19th Century Courts, Nancy Marder Sep 2018

The Changing Landscape Of 19th Century Courts, Nancy Marder

All Faculty Scholarship

Book Review of:Amalia D. Kessler. Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800–1877. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 449 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.


The American Jury System: A Synthetic Overview, Richard Lempert Jun 2015

The American Jury System: A Synthetic Overview, Richard Lempert

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This essay is intended to provide in brief compass a review of much that is known about the American jury system, including the jury’s historical origins, its political role, controversies over its role and structure, its performance, both absolutely and in comparison to judges and mixed tribunals, and proposals for improving the jury system. The essay is informed throughout by 50 years of research on the jury system, beginning with the 1965 publication of Kalven and Zeisel’s seminal book, The American Jury. The political importance of the jury is seen to lie more in the jury’s status as a one …


That Elusive Consensus: The Historiographic Significance Of William E. Nelson's Works On Judicial Review, Mark Mcgarvie Jun 2014

That Elusive Consensus: The Historiographic Significance Of William E. Nelson's Works On Judicial Review, Mark Mcgarvie

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This essay provides a historiographical context for Nelson’s work on judicial review. It argues that Nelson’s integration of intellectual and legal history not only rebutted the instrumentalist historiography that prevailed when he undertook his work on Marshall and judicial review, but also fostered an appreciation of the need to place legal actors in the intellectual context in which they acted. Highlighting the influence of Bernard Bailyn’s pathfinding work on popular sovereignty upon Nelson’s development of his consensus theory, the essay contends that Nelson’s work changed the course of academic readings of Marshall’s jurisprudence to be consistent with a broader acceptance …


Rejecting The Legal Process Theory Joker: Bill Nelson's Scholarship On Judge Edward Weinfeld And Justice Byron White, Brad Snyder Jun 2014

Rejecting The Legal Process Theory Joker: Bill Nelson's Scholarship On Judge Edward Weinfeld And Justice Byron White, Brad Snyder

Chicago-Kent Law Review

My contribution to this tribute places Bill Nelson’s scholarship about Judge Edward Weinfeld and Justice Byron White within several contexts. It is a personal history of Nelson the law student, law clerk, and young scholar; an intellectual history of legal theory since the 1960s; an examination of the influence of legal theory on Nelson’s scholarship based on his writings about Weinfeld and White; and an example of how legal historians contend with the subject of judicial reputation. Nelson was one of many former Warren Court and Burger Court clerks who joined the professoriate and rejected the legal process theory that …


A Response: The Impact Of War On Justice In The History Of American Law, William E. Nelson Jun 2014

A Response: The Impact Of War On Justice In The History Of American Law, William E. Nelson

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The foundational claim of this essay is that judges at most points in time should act with restraint and should not attempt to resolve contested issues of policy. They should incorporate new policies into the law only when the polity as a whole has already adopted a particular policy or when it is in the process of adopting one. The essay then maintains that there have been three periods in American history—the Revolution and the subsequent decades of constitution-making, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and World War II and its aftermath—when the American public as an entity did adopt policies …