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The Supreme Court Decisions On Guns And Abortion Relied Heavily On History. But Whose History?, Allison Orr Larsen

Popular Media

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The Legacy Of Johnson V. Darr: The 1925 Decision Of The All-Woman Texas Supreme Court, Jeffrey D. Dunn

St. Mary's Law Journal

The Texas Supreme Court case of Johnson v. Darr,[1] the first case decided in any state by an all-woman appellate court, was a singular event in American legal history. On January 9, 1925, three women lawyers appointed by Texas Governor Pat Neff met at the state capitol in Austin to issue rulings solely on one case involving conflicting claims to several residential properties in El Paso. The special court was appointed because the three elected justices recused themselves over a conflict of interest involving one of the litigants, a popular fraternal organization called Woodmen of the World. The special …

Revisiting The History Of The Independent State Legislature Doctrine, Hayward H. Smith

St. Mary's Law Journal

In hopes of legitimizing the independent state legislature doctrine, its proponents have recently made two claims with respect to history, which this Article refers to as the Substance/Procedure Thesis and the Prevailing View Thesis. The former admits that the original understanding was that state “legislatures” promulgating election law pursuant to the Elector Appointment and Elections Clauses are required to comply with state constitutionally-mandated “procedural” lawmaking requirements (such as a potential gubernatorial veto), but asserts that they were otherwise understood to be independent of “substantive” state constitutional restraints. The latter asserts that the independent state legislature doctrine was the “prevailing view” …

Redressing The Past To Repair The Present: The Role Of Property Law In Creating And Exacerbating Racial Disparities In Wealth And Poverty In Nova Scotia, Melissa Marsman

LLM Theses

For over 200 years African Nova Scotians have been fighting to confirm legal title to the land on which their ancestors were settled. In 2020, the Nova Scotia Supreme Court remarked “the lack of clear title and the segregated nature of their land triggered a cycle of poverty for black families that persisted for generations.” Nova Scotia has a long history of obscure land titles; however, the ensuing cycle of poverty appears to have disproportionately impacted African Nova Scotians. This thesis reframes the African Nova Scotian land titles discourse into a broader understanding about systemic anti-Black racism and White supremacist …

Arkansas Law Review's 75th Anniversary Remarks, Steve Caple, Erron Smith

Arkansas Law Review

It is an exciting time for the Arkansas Law Review, the School of Law, and the University of Arkansas. The journal is celebrating its 75th anniversary, the law school is approaching its 100th year of existence, and the university recently celebrated its 150th birthday.

The Way Lawyers Worked, Michael Risch, Mike Viney

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Court and litigation operations are opaque in the best of times, and the lack of explanatory Nineteenth Century legal records makes it even more difficult to learn how lawyers and judges went about their business. This may be one of the reasons there are so few accounts detailing the nuts and bolts of 1800s law practice. This Article illuminates the development of litigation and the law in the middle of the Nineteenth Century by examining archival court and Patent Office records.

Most accounts of the time focus either on judicial opinions or the relationship of the parties, but few articles …

The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely …

The Progressives' Antitrust Toolbox, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The period 1900 to 1930 was the Golden Age of antitrust theory, if not of enforcement. During that period courts and scholars developed nearly all of the tools that we use to this day to assess anticompetitive practices under the federal antitrust laws. In subsequent years antitrust policy veered to both the left and the right, but today seems to be returning to a position quite similar to the one that these Progressive adopted. Their principal contributions were (1) partial equilibrium analysis, which became the basis for concerns about economic concentration, the distinction between short- and long-run analysis, and later …

Journeys Through Space And Time While Reading International Law And The Politics Of History, Found On A Palimpsest, Translated For You, The Reader, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

I was invited to a symposium on Anne Orford’s book, International Law and the Politics of History. On my way there, my mind wandered, and I found myself lost in a forest of half-remembered stories and unfinished thoughts. Searching for a way out, this is what I discovered.

Anti-Discrimination Ethics Rules And The Legal Profession, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

“Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my Thoughts, and Aim of my Behaviour. How shall I gain a Reputation! How shall I Spread an Opinion of myself as a Lawyer of distinguished Genius, Learning, and Virtue.” So wrote twenty-four-year-old John Adams in his diary in 1759. He had been a licensed lawyer for just three years at that time and had already believed himself to be hounded by “Petty foggers” and “dirty Dablers in the Law”—unlicensed attorneys who, Adams claimed, fomented vexatious litigation for the fees they might earn.

Adams believed his embrace of virtue, along with genius …

Mysterious Ways, Lawrence M. Friedman

FIU Law Review

The “mystery” or “detective” novel originated in the first half of the 19th century, and quickly became extremely popular. Its origins betray changes in English and American society—the same changes that led to innovations in criminal justice, especially the creation of detective squads in the big cities. The goal of the detective was to expose secret crime—crimes committed by confidence men, and others who worked in the shadows. Thousands and thousands of detective novels have been written; they are extremely varied; but they tend to share one common trait: they turn on the problem of hidden personal identities, which the …

Fifty More Years Of Ineffable Quo? Workers’ Compensation And The Right To Personal Security, Michael C. Duff

All Faculty Scholarship

During the days of Covid-19, OSHA has been much in the news as contests surface over the boundaries of what risks of workplace harm are properly regulable by the federal government. Yet the original statute that created OSHA—the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970—was not exclusively concerned with front-end regulation of workplace harm. Just over fifty years ago, the same Act mandated an investigation of the American workers’ compensation system, which consists of a loose network of independent state workers’ compensation systems. The National Commission created by the Act to carry out the investigation issued a report of its …

The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

John Randall is the only former president of the American Bar Association to be disbarred. He wrote a will for a client, Lovell Myers, with whom Randall had been in business for over a quarter-century. The will left all of Myers’s property to Randall, and implicitly disinherited his only child, Marie Jensen. When Jensen learned of the existence of a will, she sued to set it aside. She later filed a complaint with the Iowa Committee on Professional Ethics and Conduct. That complaint was the catalyst leading to Randall’s disbarment.

Randall had acted grievously in serving as Lovell Myers’s attorney. …

On The Meaning Of Color And The End Of White(Ness), William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the history of the term “people of color” and its current status in a country struggling to overcome its racist origins. The murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other victims of state violence have generated profound anger, calls for action, and demands for dialogue. It is undoubtedly simplistic to assert that words matter. But accurate descriptions are essential for honest conversations, and words convey meanings beyond their syntax. In discussions about race and racial identity, the term “people of color” is routinely used as the antipode to the white community. …

A New Report Of Entick V. Carrington (1765), Christian Burset, T. T. Arvind

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court has described Entick v. Carrington (1765) as “the true and ultimate expression of constitutional law” for the Founding generation. For more than 250 years, judges and commentators have read that case for guidance about the rule of law, executive authority, and the original meaning of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. But we have been reading a flawed version. This Article publishes, for the first time, a previously unknown manuscript report of Entick v. Carrington. We explain why this version is more reliable than other reports of the case, and how this new discovery challenges prevailing assumptions about …

The Invention Of Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The long Progressive Era, from 1900 to 1930, was the Golden Age of antitrust theory, if not of enforcement. During that period courts and Progressive scholars developed nearly all of the tools that we use to this day to assess anticompetitive practices under the federal antitrust laws. In a very real sense we can say that this group of people invented antitrust law. The principal contributions the Progressives made to antitrust policy were (1) partial equilibrium analysis, which became the basis for concerns about economic concentration, the distinction between short- and long-run analysis, and later provided the foundation for the …