Legal History Commons^™

Higher Law And Lincoln's Antislavery Constitutionalism: What It Means To Say The Civil War Was Fought Over Slavery, Joel A. Rogers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The US Civil War was fought over slavery. But what do we really mean when we say that? This paper examines that question, first by exploring the idea of “higher law,” which gained tremendous traction in American society starting around 1850. Proponents of the idea claimed that laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act are immoral; that the immorality of such laws is self-evident, and that such immoral laws should be resisted—sometimes even with violence. Meanwhile, opponents of the idea of higher law were not necessarily in favor of slavery, but they opposed the use of extra-Constitutional means to bring …

The Unsuspected Francis Lieber, Richard Salomon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

"The Unsuspected Francis Lieber" examines paradoxes in the life and work of Francis Lieber. Lieber is best known as the author of the 1863 "Lieber Code," the War Department's General Order No. 100. It was the first modern statement of the law of armed conflict. This paper questions whether the Lieber Code was truly humanitarian, especially in view of its valorization of military necessity. Also reviewed is the contrast between the Code's extraordinarily favorable treatment of African-Americans and Lieber's personal history of slave-holding.

Lieber's shift from civil libertarian to authoritarian after 1857, as exemplified by his support of Lincoln's suspension …

South African Marriage In Policy And Practice: A Dynamic Story, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

Law forms one of the major structural contexts within which family lives play out, yet the precise dynamics connecting these two foundational institutions are still poorly understood. This article attempts to help bridge this gap by applying sociolegal concepts to empirical findings about state law's role in family, and especially in marriage, drawn from across several decades and disciplines of South Africanist scholarly research. I sketch the broad outlines of a nuanced theoretical approach for analysing the law-family relationship, which insists that the relationship entails a contingent and dynamic interplay between relatively powerful regulating institutions and relatively powerless regulated populations. …