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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

The Concept Of The State In American History, William J. Novak Oct 2015

The Concept Of The State In American History, William J. Novak

Book Chapters

Debates about the state rage in contemporary America. On the right, libertarian and tea party rhetoric fulminates about shrinking the state or shutting down the government, frequently in hyperbolic terms like the Americans for Tax Reform notion of" drowning it in a bathtub." On the left, concern about the fate of the welfare state and an ever-expanding warfare and penal state produces equally impassioned retorts. Discussion of the American state-its nature, its size, and its uncertain future-dominates the political landscape as perhaps never before.


Civil And Common Law: A Historical Analysis Of Colonial And Postcolonial Canada, Patrick S. Stroud Apr 2015

Civil And Common Law: A Historical Analysis Of Colonial And Postcolonial Canada, Patrick S. Stroud

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Legal historians divide European law into two principal families: common law (British law) and civil law (continental European law). Common law judges favor cases; courts “discover” law on a case-by-case basis and those cases make precedents for future ruling. Civil law courts favor codes; courts compare cases to existing laws and those laws control judges’ rulings. The two rarely interact, save one prominent example: Canada. British common law supposedly superseded French legal traditions in colonial Canada. But is history so binary? Did British common law truly “conquer” French civil law? Through analysis of Canadian legal history, this article demonstrates how …


Epilogue: The New Deal At Bay, Herbert J. Hovenkamp Feb 2015

Epilogue: The New Deal At Bay, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The Opening of American Law examines changes in American legal thought that began during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, and extending through the Kennedy/Johnson eras. During this period American judges and legal writers embraced various conceptions of legal "science," although they differed about what that science entailed. Beginning in the Gilded Age, the principal sources were Darwinism in the biological and social sciences, marginalism in economics and psychology, and legal historicism. The impact on judicial, legislative, and later administrative law making is difficult to exaggerate. Among the changes were vastly greater use of behavioral or deterrence based theories of legal …