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Articles 1 - 4 of 4
Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman
Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman
Martha M. Ertman
Legal doctrines banning polygamy grew out of nineteenth century Americans’ view that Mormons betrayed the nation by engaging in conduct associated with people of color. This article reveals the racial underpinnings of polygamy law by examining cartoons and other antipolygamy rhetoric of the time to demonstrate Sir Henry Maine’s famous observation that the move in progressive societies is “from status to contract.” It frames antipolygamists’ contentions as a visceral defense of racial and sexual status in the face of encroaching contractual thinking. Polygamy, they reasoned, was “natural” for people of color but so “unnatural” for whites as to produce a …
Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman
Race Treason: The Untold Story Of America's Ban On Polygamy, Martha M. Ertman
Faculty Scholarship
Legal doctrines banning polygamy grew out of nineteenth century Americans’ view that Mormons betrayed the nation by engaging in conduct associated with people of color. This article reveals the racial underpinnings of polygamy law by examining cartoons and other antipolygamy rhetoric of the time to demonstrate Sir Henry Maine’s famous observation that the move in progressive societies is “from status to contract.” It frames antipolygamists’ contentions as a visceral defense of racial and sexual status in the face of encroaching contractual thinking. Polygamy, they reasoned, was “natural” for people of color but so “unnatural” for whites as to produce a …
Go West Young Woman!: The Mercer Girls And Legal Historiography, Kristin Collins
Go West Young Woman!: The Mercer Girls And Legal Historiography, Kristin Collins
Faculty Scholarship
This essay is a response to Professor Kerry Abrams’s article The Hidden Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law, published in Vanderbilt Law Review. The Hidden Dimension tells the story of Washington Territory’s entrepreneurial Asa Shinn Mercer, who endeavored to bring hundreds of young women from the East Coast to the tiny frontier town of Seattle as prospective brides for white men who had settled there. Abrams locates the story of the Mercer Girls, as they were called, in the history of American immigration law. My response locates The Hidden Dimension in American legal historiography, both that branch of American legal historiography …
Social Justice Feminism, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem, Verna L. Williams
Social Justice Feminism, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem, Verna L. Williams
Faculty Articles and Other Publications
For the past three years, women leaders from national groups, grassroots organizations, academia and beyond have gathered to address dissonance in the women's movement, particularly dissatisfaction with the movement's emphasis on women privileged on account of their race, class, or sexuality. At these meetings of the New Women's Movement Initiative (NWMI), advocates who no longer want to do feminism have articulated a desire for social justice feminism. This article analyzes what such a shift might mean for feminist practice and legal theory.
Drawing on history, specifically the work of the women behind the Brandeis brief in the Muller v. Oregon …