Legal History Commons^™

The Right To Trial By Jury Shall Remain Inviolate: Jury Trials In Civil Actions In Georgia’S Courts, David E. Shipley

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Trials, though rare, “shape almost every aspect of procedure,” and the jury trial is a distinctive feature of civil litigation in the United States. The Seventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ‘preserves’ the right to jury trial “[i]n suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars.” Even though this amendment does not apply to the states, courts in the states “honor the right to the extent it is created in their constitutions or local statutes.”

The Georgia Constitution provides that “[t]he right to trial by jury shall remain inviolate,” and Georgia’s appellate courts have shown …

American Religious Liberty Without (Much) Theory: A Review Of Religion And The American Constitutional Experiment, 5th Edition, Nathan S. Chapman

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Book review of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment, 5th ed. By John Witte Jr., Joel A. Nichols, and Richard W. Garnett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 464. $150.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper); $26.99 (digital). ISBN: 9780197587614.

Constitutional Text, Founding-Era History, And The Independent-State-Legislature Theory, Dan T. Coenen

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One question raised by proponents of the so-called independent-state-legislature theory concerns the extent to which state courts can apply state constitutional requirements to invalidate state laws that concern federal elections. According to one proposed application of the theory, state courts can never subject such laws to state-constitution-based judicial review. According to another application, federal courts can broadly, though not invariably, foreclose state courts from drawing on state constitutions to invalidate federal-election-related state legislation. This article evaluates whether either of these positions comports with the original meaning of the Constitution. Given the article’s focus on the originalist methodology, it directs attention …

Popular Enforcement Of Controversial Legislation, Randy Beck

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Texas opted for popular enforcement of Senate Bill 8 (S.B. 8), prohibiting abortion once a fetal heartbeat can be detected. In an effort to prevent pre-enforcement judicial review, the legislature precluded enforcement of the statute by government officials. Instead, any member of the public may sue for statutory damages of at least $10,000 from any person who (1) performs an abortion violating the statute, (2) knowingly aids or abets such an abortion, or (3) “intends” to perform or aid and abet such an abortion.

The cause of action authorized by S.B. 8 is a “popular action,” a once common method …

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

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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.

Joint Authorship And Dramatic Works: A Critical History, Mary Lafrance

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This Article examines the evolution of copyright law pertaining to collaborative authorship and finds that much of the core legal doctrine in this area arose from disputes involving dramatic works. This fresh look at theatrical collaborations reveals a rich history that calls into question the modem judicial presumption that dramatic writing is the product of individual genius. Examining the history of Anglo- American law's response to collaboration in dramatic works offers valuable insight into the development of multiple concepts related to authorship-in particular, the rules governing derivative works, works made for hire, and joint works. It also demonstrates that the …

The Clean Air Act Of 1963: Postwar Environmental Politics And The Debate Over Federal Power, Adam D. Orford

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This Article explores the development of the Clean Air Act of 1963, the first law to allow the federal government to fight air pollution rather than study it. The Article focuses on the postwar years (1945-1963) and explores the rise of public health medical research, cooperative federalism, and the desire to harness the powers of the federal government for domestic social improvement, as key precursors to environmental law. It examines the origins of the idea that the federal government should "do something" about air pollution, and how that idea was translated, through drafting, lobbying, politicking, hearings, debate, influence, and votes, …

Rabbi Lamm, The Fifth Amendment, And Comparative Jewish Law, Samuel J. Levine

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Rabbi Norman Lamm’s 1956 article, “The Fifth Amendment and Its Equivalent in the Halakha,” provides important lessons for scholarship in both Jewish and American law. Sixty-five years after it was published, the article remains, in many ways, a model for interdisciplinary and comparative study of Jewish law, drawing upon sources in the Jewish legal tradition, American legal history, and modern psychology. In so doing, the article proves faithful to each discipline on its own terms, producing insights that illuminate all three disciplines while respecting the internal logic within each one. In addition to many other distinctions, since its initial publication, …

Originalism From The Soft Southern Strategy To The New Right: The Constitutional Politics Of Sam Ervin Jr, Logan E. Sawyer Iii

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Although originalism’s emergence as an important theory of constitutional interpretation is usually attributed to efforts by the Reagan administration, the role the theory played in the South’s determined resistance to civil rights legislation in the 1960s actually helped create the Reagan coalition in the first place. North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin Jr., the constitutional theorist of the Southern Caucus, developed and deployed originalism because he saw its potential to stymie civil rights legislation and stabilize a Democratic coalition under significant stress. Ervin failed in those efforts, but his turn to originalism had lasting effects. The theory helped Ervin and other …

Nation’S Business And The Environment: The U.S. Chamber’S Changing Relationships With Ddt, “Ecologists,” Regulations, And Renewable Energy, Adam D. Orford

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Nation’s Business was a monthly business magazine published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with a subscription list larger than Business Week, Forbes, or Fortune. This study explores how the magazine responded and adapted to the rise of environmentalism, and environmental regulation of business, by exploring its treatment of four topics: DDT, environmentalists, government regulation, and renewable energy. It is built on a full-text review of all issues of Nation’s Business published between 1945 and 1981. It reveals the development of a variety of anti-environmental logics and discourses, including the delegitimization of environmentalism as emotional and irrational, the undermining …

"Our Most Sacred Legal Commitments": A Digital Exploration Of The U.S. Supreme Court Defining Who We Are And How They Should Opine, Eric C. Nystrom, David S. Tanenhaus

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This Article focuses on uncovering the multiple meanings of the word "our" in the published opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court from Chisholm to modern times. To do so, we use a digital legal history approach, combining robust court data, text mining techniques, and expert word classification, using a set of custom open-source tools and open data.

Glimpses Of Women At The Tokyo Tribunal, Diane Marie Amann

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Compared to its Nuremberg counterpart, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East has scarcely been visible in the seven decades since both tribunals’ inception. Recently the situation has changed, as publications of IMTFE documents have occurred alongside divers legal and historical writings, as well as two films and a miniseries. These new accounts give new visibility to the Tokyo Trial – or at least to the roles that men played at those trials. This essay identifies several of the women at Tokyo and explores roles they played there, with emphasis on lawyers and analysts for the prosecution and the …

Marshall Shapo's "Constitutional Tort" Fifty-Five Years Later, Michael Wells

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In 1965, Northwestern University Law Review published Professor Marshall Shapo’s article, Constitutional Tort: Monroe v. Pape and the Frontiers Beyond.1 Professor Shapo’s paper analyzed the origins of constitutional tort law, which consists of suits for damages for constitutional violations committed by government officials or the governments themselves. The article began with an account of the post-Civil War background of 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a statute enacted in 1871 to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment. After the Civil War, recalcitrant southerners, acting through groups like the Ku Klux Klan, intimidated the freedmen and their white supporters, organized lynch mobs, burned houses, and, …

Forgotten Federal-Missionary Partnerships: New Light On The Establishment Clause, Nathan Chapman

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Americans have long disputed whether the government may support religious instruction as part of an elementary education. Since Everson v. Board of Education (1947), the Supreme Court has gradually articulated a doctrine that permits states to provide funds, indirectly through vouchers and in some cases directly through grants, to religious schools for the nonreligious goods they provide. Unlike most other areas of Establishment Clause jurisprudence, however, the Court has not built this doctrine on a historical foundation. In fact, in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), the dissenters from this doctrine were the ones to rely on the founding-era record.

Intriguingly, …

Method And Dialogue In History And Originalism, Logan E. Sawyer Iii

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There is a sharp separation between the scholarly literature of originalists and professional historians. Originalists cite one another, but regularly ignore recent work by historians. Historians are generally happy to return the favor. Engagement between the two communities is too often limited to methodological disputes and amicus briefs. As a result, historical inquiry offers less to constitutional law than it might, and constitutional lawyers offer less to history than they could. Some of this separation is due to unavoidable methodological tension, but those tensions have not always frustrated productive dialogue. Originalism, in fact, emerged as an important theory of constitutional …

Constructing The Original Scope Of Constitutional Rights, Nathan Chapman

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In this solicited response to Ingrid Wuerth's "The Due Process and Other Constitutional Rights of Foreign Nations," I explain and justify Wuerth's methodology for constructing the original scope of constitutional rights. The original understanding of the Constitution, based on text and historical context, is a universally acknowledged part of constitutional law today. The original scope of constitutional rights — who was entitled to them, where they extended, and so on — is a particularly difficult question that requires a measure of construction based on the entire historical context. Wuerth rightly proceeds one right at a time with a careful consideration …

Between Economic Planning And Market Competition: Institutional Law And Economics In The Us, Laura Phillips Sawyer

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In 1926 John Maurice Clark published a seminal text in institutionalist economics, Social Control of Business, surveying the ways in which business was subject to control by a variety of formal and informal constraints. 1 The text rejected mainstream ideas in neoclassical political economy by explaining how individual self-interest and competition could be manipulated not only through legal rules but also by custom, habit, codes of ethics, and morals. Representative of the institutionalist movement, Clark discarded presumptions of an individualistic economy based on market competition. Instead, he posited that long-term public goals of prosperity and equity could be achieved through …

A Reformed Liberalism: Michael Mcconnell’S Contributions To Christian Jurisprudence, Nathan Chapman

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Michael McConnell is one of the most influential constitutional scholars of the past thirty years. He has written a great deal about religious liberty, but relatively little about how his own religious beliefs may relate to his constitutional jurisprudence. This essay is the first to explore the connection between McConnell’s religious views and scholarship. The essay engages with a short piece by McConnell that sketches the outlines of a “reformed liberalism.” McConnell argued that reformed Christian theology is compatible with the classical liberalism that animated the framing of the U.S. Constitution. Though he did not develop this account into a …

Qui Tam Litigation Against Government Officials: Constitutional Implications Of A Neglected History, Randy Beck

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The Supreme Court concluded twenty-five years ago, in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, that uninjured private plaintiffs may not litigate “generalized grievances” about the legality of executive branch conduct. According to the Lujan Court, Congress lacked power to authorize suit by a plaintiff who could not establish some “particularized” injury from the challenged conduct. The Court believed litigation to require executive branch legal compliance, brought by an uninjured private party, is not a “case” or “controversy” within the Article III judicial power and impermissibly reassigns the President’s Article II responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The …

Inimicus Libertatis: Chief Justice Rehnquist’S Majority Or Plurality Opinions In The Field Of Criminal Procedure, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

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Since the early 1970’s an increasingly conservative Supreme Court of the United States has been leading this country through a “Criminal Procedure Counterrevolution” (also called “The Rehnquisition”), during which the federal rights and remedies of criminal defendants have been inexorably and significantly eroded. There are numerous books and law review articles discussing this counterrevolution. Chief Justice Rehnquist, the most articulate and ideological of the Courts conservative justices, may properly be regarded as the intellectual founder and leader of this trend in favor of restricting criminal procedure rights.

This article analyzes and provides a bibliography of Supreme Court criminal procedure opinions …

Trade Association, State Building, And The Sherman Act: The U.S. Chamber Of Commerce, 1912-25, Laura Phillips Sawyer

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC), and "organization of organizations," was conceived in 1912 in coordination with administrators at the Department of Commerce and Labor to promote the collection of commercially valuable trade information. A critical though often neglected, aspect of administrative state building has been the information-gathering and dissemination practices spearheaded by the Department of Commerce and later the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in conjunction with the USCC. Rather than a strictly adversarial relationship, in the early twentieth century business-government relations created mutually constitutive administrative capacities in both private trade associations and public administrative agencies.

Principle And Politics In The New History Of Originalism, Logan E. Sawyer Iii

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The emergence of a new form of originalism has sparked an interest in the theory’s past that is particularly welcome as developments on the Supreme Court and in the Republican Party unsettle the theory’s place in American law and politics. Our understanding of the theory’s development, however, has been limited by an unfortunate and unnecessary division between what are now two separate histories of originalism. One history examines the theory’s development in academia and emphasizes the influence of principled argument. A second investigates its role in politics and highlights the role of conservative interests. This review essay identifies this division …

California Fair Trade: Antitrust And The Politics Of “Fairness” In U.S. Competition Policy, Laura Phillips Sawyer

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In the decades before World War II, U.S. antitrust law was anything but settled. Considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from the states. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California’s retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as “fair trade.” Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis and institutional economist E. R. A. Seligman, supported RPM as a protection to independent proprietors. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted “unfair competition” allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust …

Political Dysfunction And The Election Of Donald Trump: Problems Of The U.S. Constitution's Presidency, David Orentlicher

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In this article, Professor Orentlicher examines the Constitution's design for the executive branch. He argues that by opting for a single executive rather than a multi-person executive, the Constitution causes two serious problems-it fuels the high levels of partisan polarization that we see today, and it increases the likelihood of misguided presidential decision making. Drawing on the experience in other countries with executive power shared by multiple officials, he proposes a bipartisan executive.

Why The Right Embraced Rights, Logan E. Sawyer Iii

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Book review of he Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers and the Remaking of American Government by Jefferson Decker (Oxford U. Press 2016).

Juvenile Justice In Global Perspective: From Chicago To Shanghai And Back To First Principles, David S. Tanenhaus

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No abstract provided.

‘Let’S Change The Law’: Arkansas And The Puzzle Of Juvenile Justice Reform In The 1990s, David S. Tanenhaus, Eric C. Nystrom

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No abstract provided.

One Of The Perfect People, Ann Puckett

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This Article eulogizes Nancy P. Johnson.

Andrew B. Arnold's Fueling The Gilded Age: Railroads, Miners, And Disorder In Pennsylvania Coal Country, Laura Phillips Sawyer

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Andrew Arnold’s Fueling the Gilded Age explores the struggles for managerial control and economic power that erupted among coal miners, coal operators, and railroad executives in central Pennsylvania between 1872 and 1902. Rather than presenting an unassailable triumph of the railroads’ interests over labor, Arnold argues that the “coal industry defied order” (p. 3) and laborers exhibited “unexpected agency ” (p. 4, emphasis in original) by thwarting the plans of railroad executives to impose managerial capitalism from the top down. Instead, wage earners “refused to accept their designated fate as commodities” (p. 222) and thereby exerted influence on the institutional …

Hearing Voices: Non-Party Stories In Abortion And Gay Rights Advocacy, Linda H. Edwards

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During the twelve years after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court considered a number of abortion issues, but Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists was the first case to raise a direct call for Roe’s demise. The issues galvanized interests on all sides. Among the welter of amicus briefs was a remarkable brief destined to create a new, controversial, and potentially powerful form of appellate advocacy. Primarily authored by Lynn M. Paltrow, the brief was submitted on behalf of the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL). Like a Brandeis Brief, the NARAL brief relies on sources outside …