Legal History Commons^™

What Is Remembered, Alice Ristroph

Michigan Law Review

Review of Sarah A. Seo's Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom.

The Exit Myth: Family Law, Gender Roles, And Changing Attitudes Toward Female Victims Of Domestic Violence, Carolyn B. Ramsey

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Article presents a hypothesis suggesting how and why the criminal justice response to domestic violence changed, over the course of the twentieth century, from sympathy for abused women and a surprising degree of state intervention in intimate relationships to the apathy and discrimination that the battered women' movement exposed. The riddle of declining public sympathy for female victims ofintimate-partner violence can only be solved by looking beyond the criminal law to the social and legal changes that created the Exit Myth. While the situation that gave rise to the battered womens movement in the 1970s is often presumed to …

Keeping The State Out: The Separation Of Law And State In Classical Islamic Law, Lubna A. Alam

Michigan Law Review

The implementation and enforcement of Islamic law, especially Islamic criminal law, by modem-day Muslim nation-states is fraught with controversy and challenges. In Pakistan, the documented problems and failures of the country's attempt to codify Islamic law on extramarital sexual relations have led to efforts to remove rape cases from Islamic law courts to civil law courts. In striking contrast to Pakistan's experience, the Republic of the Maldives recently commissioned a draft of a penal law and sentencing guidelines based on Islamic law that abides by international norms. The incorporation of Islamic law into the legal systems of various countries around …

Rape And The Querela In Italy: False Protection Of Victim Agency, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

This Essay describes the history of the querela in Italy and explores the controversy surrounding the decision to maintain this institution. In addition, this Essay questions the degree to which the querela can protect victim agency when the attitudes of judges and lawyers in the Italian criminal justice system reflect persistent rape myths.

Function Over Form: Reviving The Criminal Jury's Historical Role As A Sentencing Body, Chris Kemmitt

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article argues that the Supreme Court, as evinced by its recent spate of criminal jury decisions, has abandoned the criminal jury known to the Founders and, in so doing, has severely eroded the protections intended to inhere in the Sixth Amendment jury trial right. It then proposes one potential solution to this problem.

According to the Supreme Court, this recent line of cases has been motivated by the need to preserve the "ancient guarantee" articulated in the Sixth Amendment under a new set of legal circumstances. Unfortunately, the Court misinterprets the ancient guarantee that it is ostensibly attempting to …

Facing Evil, Joseph E. Kennedy

Michigan Law Review

It is no earthshaking news that the American public has become fascinated- some would say obsessed-with crime over the last few decades. Moreover, this fascination has translated into a potent political force that has remade the world of criminal justice. Up through the middle of the 1960s crime was not something about which politicians had much to say. What was there to say? "Crime is bad." "We do what we can about crime." "Crime will always be with us at one level or another." Only a hermit could have missed the transformation of crime over the last couple of decades …

Roman Rape: An Overview Of Roman Rape Laws From The Republican Period To Justinian's Reign, Nghiem L. Nguyen

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

The modern Western crime of rape is commonly defined as "[u]nlawful sexual activity (esp. intercourse) with a person (usu. a female) without consent and usu. by force or threat of injury," and it is often seen as an assault of the person's body and a violation of self-autonomy. However, this differs significantly from the conception of rape in ancient Rome. In fact, "there is no single word in... Latin with the same semantic field as the modern English word 'rape.'” For the Romans, the act of rape was covered under a variety of legal terms, but each of those words …

Ghosts Of Alabama: The Prosecution Of Bobby Frank Cherry For The Bombing Of The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Donald Q. Cochran

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Perhaps no other crime in American history has shocked the conscience of America like the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. In May of 2002- almost thirty-nine years after the bombing- Bobby Frank Cherry was brought to trial for the murders of Addie, Carole, Cynthia, and Denise. He was the last person to be tried for the bombing. As an Assistant United States Attorney in Birmingham, Alabama it was my privilege to be a part of the prosecution team that brought Cherry to justice. This Article tells the story of that prosecution and explores the …

Pleas' Progress, Stephanos Bibas

Michigan Law Review

George Fisher's new book, Plea Bargaining's Triumph, is really three books in one. The first part is a careful, detailed explanation of how and why plea bargaining exploded in Middlesex County, Massachusetts in the nineteenth century. This part is the fruit of an impressive amount of original research in Massachusetts court records and newspaper archives. The second part of the book looks more broadly at other academic histories of plea bargaining in England, California, and New York. It explains how the forces that produced plea bargaining in Middlesex County likewise contributed to plea bargaining's rise elsewhere. The final part …

Are We Protecting The Wrong Rights?, Jennifer L. Saulino

Michigan Law Review

Elizabeth Bartholet, in her book Nobody's Children, takes a strong step toward beginning a new kind of dialogue about abused and neglected children. She positions herself as a liberal who has come to terms with the fact that traditional liberal ideals are in conflict with the needs of abused and neglected children (p. 5). In doing so, she tries to convince her readers that, regardless of ideology, we all should have a different focus in the area of child abuse and neglect law. She uses Sabrina as one of several examples of how programs for abused and neglected children that …

Healing The Blind Goddess: Race And Criminal Justice, Mark D. Rosenbaum, Daniel P. Tokaji

Michigan Law Review

Once again, issues of race, ethnicity, and class within our criminal justice system have been thrust into the public spotlight. On both sides of the country, in our nation's two largest cities, police are being called to account for acts of violence directed toward poor people of color. In New York City, a West African immigrant named Amadou Diallo was killed by four white police officers, who fired forty-one bullets at the unarmed man as he stood in the vestibule of his apartment building in a poor section of the Bronx. Did race influence the officers' decisions to fire the …

Judicial Review & The Policy Of Federal Abstention: A Juvenile's Right To Ensure The Existence Of A "Substantial Federal Interest", Matthew Drexler

Michigan Law Review

The problem of juvenile delinquency must be dealt with in an effective and meaningful manner if we are to reduce the ever increasing levels of crime and improve the quality of life in America. With these words, the United States Senate opened its report in support of the first major federal juvenile delinquency statute in almost forty years. The goal of the statute and of federal involvement in juvenile delinquency proceedings was to give the highest attention to preventing juvenile crime and to minimizing the involvement of juveniles in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Until 1974, the federal government …

Reconceiving The Right To Present Witnesses, Richard A. Nagareda

Michigan Law Review

Modem American law is, in a sense, a system of compartments. For understandable curricular reasons, legal education sharply distinguishes the law of evidence from both constitutional law and criminal procedure. In fact, the lines of demarcation between these three subjects extend well beyond law school to the organization of the leading treatises and case headnotes to which practicing lawyers routinely refer in their trade. Many of the most interesting questions in the law, however, do not rest squarely within a single compartment; instead, they concern the content and legitimacy of the lines of demarcation themselves. This article explores a significant, …

Lynching Ethics: Toward A Theory Of Racialized Defenses, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

So much depends upon a rope in Mobile, Alabama. To hang Michael Donald, Henry Hays and James "Tiger" Knowles tied up "a piece of nylon rope about twenty feet long, yellow nylon." They borrowed the rope from Frank Cox, Hays's brother-in-law. Cox "went out in the back" of his mother's "boatshed, or something like that, maybe it was in the lodge." He "got a rope," climbed into the front seat of Hays's Buick Wildcat, and handed it to Knowles sitting in the back seat. So much depends upon a noose. Knowles "made a hangman's noose out of the rope," thirteen …

Revenge For The Condemned, Sara Sun Beale, Paul H. Haagen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of V.A.C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770-1868

Crime And The Courts In England 1660-1800, Frank C. Shaw

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Crime and the Courts in England 1660-1800 by J.M. Beattie

The Lindbergh Kidnapping Revisited, John F. Keenan

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann by Ludovic Kennedy

Conscience And The Law: The English Criminal Jury, Robert C. Palmer

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Verdict According to Conscience by Thomas Andrew Green

Euthanasia For Sale?, A.W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Easing the Passing: The Trial of Dr. John Bodkin Adams by Patrick Devlin

The Trials Of Israel Lipski, Blaine G. Renfert

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Trials of Israel Lipski by Martin L. Friedland

Cannibalism And The Common Law: The Story Of The Tragic Last Voyage Of The Mignonette And The Strange Legal Proceedings To Which It Gave Rise, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which it Gave Rise by A.W. Brian Simpson

Capital Punishment: Criminal Law And Social Evolution, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Capital Punishment: Criminal Law and Social Evolution by Jan Gorecki

Criminal Justice In Colonial America, 1606-1660, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Criminal Justice in Colonial America, 1606-1660 by Bradley Chapin

From Pillory To Penitentiary: The Rise Of Criminal Incarceration In Early Massachusetts, Adam J. Hirsch

Michigan Law Review

While the transition from the old forms of criminal sanction to incarceration was perhaps not, as Jeremy Bentham claimed, "one of the most signal improvements that have ever yet been made in our criminal legislation," one does not overstate to call it a signal development in the history of Anglo-American criminal justice - a development, one may add, that still wants adequate examination, much less explanation. This Article attempts to do both for one sample region: Massachusetts. Though the jurisprudential movement from pillory to penitentiary took place throughout the new American republic, as well as much of western Europe, our …

Social Research And The Use Of Medieval Criminal Records, Edward Powell

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Society and Homicide in Thirteenth-Century England by James Buchanan Given, and Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 by Barbara A. Hanawalt

Popular Justice: A History Of American Criminal Justice, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice by Samuel Walker

Incapacitating The Habitual Criminal: The English Experience, Sir Leon Radzinowicz, Roger Hood

Michigan Law Review

In this Article, Sir Leon Radzinowicz and .Dr. Roger Hood trace 150 years of unsuccessful English efforts to identify, sentence, and reform habitual criminal offenders. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Rummel v. Estelle has publicized habitual offender statutes in the United States. But Rummel primarily addressed the constitutionality, rather than the desirability, of a state habitual offender statute. This Article examines the broader policy questions common to habitual offender programs in both the United Stales and Great Britain. It describes the tension between liberal tradition and the state's desire to incapacitate those who repeatedly threaten life or property.

For Capital Punishment, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Book Notice about For Capital Punishment by Walter Berns

The Rise Of Prisons And The Origins Of The Rehabilitative Ideal, Carl E. Schneider

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic by David J. Rothman

Grand Jury Secrecy, Richard M. Calkins

Michigan Law Review

When a leading state such as Illinois enacts "reform" legislation, an impact on the legislatures of other jurisdictions may be anticipated. Accordingly, a need exists for an examination of this legislation in the light of the common-law background of grand jury secrecy and for a further analysis of it in the face of the growing trend toward more liberalized discovery of grand jury minutes in other jurisdictions. It is the contention of the author that such an empirical study will demonstrate that this legislation adopted by Illinois is contrary to all modern judicial thinking and is, in fact, a retrogressive …